In 1995 I became part of the AMS Education Program team upon the invitation of its founding Director Ira Geer. My colleague Joe Moran, who was writing weather education materials for the Program asked me to help edit the "Glossary of Weather and Climate with Related Oceanic and Hydrologic Terms," which was intended for educators, students and the public. This book, which became a popular publication for AMS, helped pave the way for my nearly quarter century of work with the team.

Within a several months of completion of the Glossary’s final draft, Ira asked me if I could prepare a daily national weather summary that would be used as an integral part of a new K-12 teacher enhancement course to be called "DataStreme Weather." Apparently, he had planned on using the national weather summary that the National Weather Service (NWS) had produced every day for years to help the teacher participants attain a better appreciation of current weather. However, NWS had decided to terminate creating this bulletin a few months before the pilot run of DataStreme Weather. Ira asked if I could write the daily weather summary that would be geared for teachers. Beginning in January 1996 and running through December 2015, I wrote five daily weather summaries each week during the academic year that focused upon the weather across the 48 contiguous states, as well as Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico/U.S. Virgin Islands. My goal was to provide the participants and their students with easy to understand information about weather systems moving across the country.

During the pilot run of the course in spring 1996 I had to write the summaries in a strict text format with a fixed number of lines per page. These files were sent to the participants along with other materials in compressed files. However, by the fall run of the course, the decision was made—with much consultation with Ira and others in the Education Program such as Bernard Blair and Bob Weinbeck—to use the internet, which meant I could use an html editor to write my summary.

Since that first year, we expanded the teacher education program to include Water in the Earth System, DataStreme Oceans and DataStreme Earth Climate System. This meant that I was preparing Weekly News items for these courses. What a run with a wonderful team!

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