Both teachers and students will find better ways than the ones presented here to look at a rivers flood history. Any river could be used and any resource could be used too. I would like to hear from anyone that has developed a similar lesson or used part of this lesson to branch off in a different direction. Have students identify major rivers in Nebraska that have a city or number of cities on or near it. It would be nice if some of these cities would part of Climprob s database.
Many towns now have a community web page with a contact person.
Have students make contact with these communities and see if they could collect data from them that might be found in the local newspaper or from personal interviews. Another way could be to contact the local science teacher through email and set up a dialog with science students from the selected towns. Personally, I would first try the community web page. The idea that I would try to bring to the students is the many different factors that could lead to floods. In the above example the students could start to look at several different precipitation patterns and then try to answer the question what caused the flood.