Remember Tilly Smith, the 10-year-old British schoolgirl who alerted her family about the tsunami while they were on vacation in Thailand? Thanks to an informative geography lesson on tsunamis and earthquakes, Tilly was able to save several lives.

With its recent project set to introduce meteorological laboratories in schools, the department of science and technology (DST) hopes that Indian students will soon be able, like Tilly, to put the knowledge gained in schools to practical use. Under the NCRPROBE (National Capital Region Participation of youth in Real time field Observations for the Benefit of Education) project, school students will be trained to understand day-to-day weather conditions and make meteorological observations.

Students will be able to measure temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and wind speed. With the help of teachers, they will record meteorological observations at fixed intervals. Each lab will have the apparatus needed for observing weather conditions. These include maximum and minimum thermometers, wet bulb and dry bulb thermometers for measuring relative humidity, rain gauges, wind vanes, barometers, and anemometers for calculating wind speed.

?Children are always inquisitive about nature. Through this project, they will learn to identify different climatic phenomena and will know why it was cloudy on a particular day or how the temperature decreases,? says Dr Malti Goel, adviser and scientist, DST, who?s also the project coordinator.

The project was first conceived by Prof. V.S. Ramamurthy, secretary, DST. Currently, model PROBE programmes have been initiated in six schools in Delhi. Plans are afoot to extend the project to 44 more schools in and around the capital over the next two years.

The project?s aim is to convert school students from being passive learners to active providers of information. For this purpose, school computers will be linked later to central DST and Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) servers. Data collected by students, says Dr H.N. Srivastava, former additional director general of meteorology, IMD, and member of the expert committee on PROBE, will help in minute weather-mapping of a region.

Being part of PROBE enables school students to gain practical knowledge and also helps to make science education interesting. ?Earlier, we used to only read about these phenomena in class, but now we are getting practical experience. For instance, before Dussehra, the average maximum day temperature was 29 degree Celsius. One week later, we noticed that it had dropped to 22 degrees. Science and geography classes are now more interesting,? says Sarthak Gupta, a Class IX student of Air Force Bal Bharati School (AFBBS), Delhi. The school is currently part of the model PROBE programme.

In AFBBS, where the project was started in December 2004, a group of four students on a rotation basis notes down the met observations every day. ?We started the project with Class VII first, but now we have introduced it in Class IX,? says Gurvinder Kang, geography teacher, AFBBS.

Students also keep records of the weather forecast in newspapers and analyse their observations every week. ?The observations are then read out in the school assembly,? adds Kang. The other schools that are part of the project include Army Public School in Dhaula Kuan, Army Public School, Noida, Naval Public School in Chanakyapuri and Air Force School in Subroto Park.

Prior to the NCRPROBE project, the DST launched a similar scheme to cover 100 higher secondary schools in Uttaranchal. The initiative taken in 2003 has been running successfully in 50 schools. Besides benefiting students, the Uttaranchal programme fills the gaps in mountain meteorological data. The recorded data is studied and analysed by scientists in nodal centres in order to understand mountain meteorology.