The Catholic School Board is partnering with the University of Windsor to help create the largest rain gauge network in the country.
The Windsor Essex Catholic District School Board is giving all 1,500 of its Grade 8 students a rain gauge to track rainfall in the region and support a better understanding of weather trends.
Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips says its a very exciting project.
"The fact that the rainfall has changed so dramatically here in recent years, this is what's exciting about it. Because we don't have really proper measurements to be able to understand why we're seeing so much," says Phillips.
He says in the last 12-15 years annual rainfall amounts in Windsor-Essex have increased around 23%
Data will be collected from the Grade 8 students starting in the spring with the help of University of Windsor students.
"We'll tie it to the Grade 8 curriculum as well to the Grade 9 curriculum where our geography teachers will take and collect all the information and set up mapping through GIS to do a number of different pieces to talk about the analysis," says Dan Fister, WECDSB executive superintendent of innovation and human resources.
University of Windsor Dean of Science Chris Houser says the time spent in Grade 8 classrooms will go toward course credits for university students. They also hope to use the data collected in future research studies.
"The data that will be collected here will be invaluable for our understanding of lake levels, of erosion or pollution within the Great Lakes and so this becomes an important part of what we do at the university as well," says Houser.
The WECDSB hopes to continue to grow its rain gauge network each year by continuing to provide gauges to each new round of students.
