Ed Hopkins is a professional meteorologist and is the Senior Scientist with Ross Computational Resources , a local small educational software engineering business. He has been the Principal Investigator for the EarthLab Project .
He has also been associated with the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. Ed has been involved with science education at many levels for more than 25 years. Starting from his Bachelors degree in Chemistry (Chemistry Course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1966) and a Masters Degree in Science Education (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1968), he has been involved with teaching chemistry, physics, physical science and meteorology courses at both the high school (Lake Mills, WI) and college levels (Northern Illinois University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison). He also was a staff instructor at the U.S. Army Engineer School at Ft. Belvoir, VA. In addition, Ed has prepared a weather and climate instructional resource listing for K-12 teachers and has been actively involved with the educational efforts of the American Meteorological Society, to include Project Atmosphere and the DataStreme Project, a teacher enhancment distance education course. He also was a consultant to a program called Wisconsin Rockets for Schools , sponsored by the Wisconsin Space Business Roundtable.
His professional interest has been in climates of Wisconsin, past climates and climatic change. His doctoral dissertation was on the evaluation of the monthly variations in the solar radiation reaching the top of the earth's atmosphere over the past 500,000 years. These variations have been important for explaining the climatic variations over that period, especially that of the large scale glaciations.
Wisconsin Rockets for Schools - Space and environment (with D. Dunlop). To be presented at Sixth Symposium on Education. American Meteorological Society, Long Beach, CA. Feb. 1997.
Interactive laboratory exercises in meteorology (with R.A. Ross). NECC-96 (National Educational Computing Conference) June 1996, Minneapolis. pp. 181-183.
Project Atmosphere: An AMS/AERA partnership with fire and forest meteorologists (with F. McCullum). Preprints, 22nd Conf on Agricultural and Forest Meteorology with Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology. American Meteorological Society, Atlanta, GA. 1996: pp. 142-145.
Using meteorological case studies in the EarthLab Learning Environment (with R.A. Ross and G.B. Broughton) CAL Met95 (Computer Assisted Learning in Meteorology) 17-25 July. Toulouse, France.
Building partnerships through EarthLab. Preprints, Joint Session Fourth Symposium on Education and 11th Conference on Interactive Information and Processing System. American Meteorological Society, Dallas, TX. pp. 5-8. 1995.
The EarthLab Project, ACM SIGCUE Outlook 22, (2), 42-45. 1994.
Resource Listing for Weather/Climate Instruction. (revised) Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. UW-Madison. 1995.
A Note on the Performance of Climate Forecasts of Asia Based on the Periodic Portion of the Data: 1986-1987. (with R.A. Bryson). Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. (Earth Planet. Sci.) 102, 105-112.
"Evapoclimatonomy III: The Reconciliation of Monthly Runoff and Evaporation in the Climatic Balance of Evaporable Water on Land Areas" (with H.H. Lettau). J.Appl. Meteor. 30,776-792. 1990
"Madison Chapter of the AMS Initiative to Enhance Weather Education in Area Schools" (with P.S. Naber et al.). Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc.. 72,. 657- 660. 1990.
Analysis of Astronomically-Induced Monthly and Zonally Averaged Extra-atmospheric Irradiance Variations for the Earth over the Last 500,000 Years. Dept. of Meteorology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1985.
Meteorology: Weather and Climate (with F.S. Sechrist). UW Extension, 1974.
A Study of the Rationale of Unified Science Curricula at the Secondary Level. Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin.1968.
21 August 1996