The atmosphere surrounds all of us and provides life-giving rains, hazardous storms, and floods. These lessons introduce the formation of large-scale and local winds and how they combine to produce storms and hurricanes.

The names of hundreds of local winds that travel around our mountainous islands show the awareness of the Hawaiians to the ways weather changes over a day and with the seasons.

Other lessons present the behavior and path of Kīlauea’s volcanic emissions and the inter-annual changes in weather patterns and climate known as El Niño, caused by changes in the Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures.

View Atmospheric Science lessons produced through NSF-funded projects