An Interactive Web Application Helps Students Explore Water Balance Concepts

The concept of a water balance is foundational topic in hydrology classrooms. While understanding and applying this crucial to the introduction more advanced topics, students often struggle develop thorough relationships between components, assumptions, limitations balance. To aid developing working balance, we developed web application that runs one dimensional Thornthwaite-type at any thousands NOAA climate stations across continental United States using local soil-water storage capacity station location. Within app, can manipulate capacity, latitude, temperature, precipitation better understand how it works explore scenarios land use, extreme weather, change. free will run on device open an internet browser window (laptops, chromebooks, smartphones, etc). Here present details model, functionality application, link several ready-made classroom activities. Finally, results from student surveys two classrooms show may learn concepts effectively than traditional methods such as spreadsheet computations.