Environment

Do You Really Understand Weather Warnings? The Effects of Individuals’ Background on Understanding Severe Weather Messaging

Atmospheric Science Students

By Alex Makarchuk

Imagine you are having dinner with your family, and suddenly a warning from the National Weather Service (NWS) blares on your phone: “TORNADO WARNING ISSUED FOR YOUR AREA.” Your first response to the loud noise and a scary message may put you and your family in a panic or leave you in a state of confusion, as the words used in the warning make you unsure how to keep your family safe. Public communication is one of many jobs of a meteorologist, and one of the hardest.

Photo of a funnel cloud touching down.
Justin1569 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

NWS sends out just over 50,000 warnings a year across the country (Erdman 2022) to protect the public from damage that Mother Nature can cause. These warnings and messages only work if the reader can understand the message. If someone doesn’t understand what is happening right now, how are they supposed to take shelter and make informed decisions on what to do next? Sharing these warnings with millions of people across the country is a difficult job, which is why it is so important that we can build these messages so that everyone can understand the dangers and take proper action. It starts with understanding how people interpret these messages and why they interpret them that way.

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Where Does Our Food Go When We Throw it Away? How City-Led Food Waste Composting Diverts Waste and Benefits Communities

Atmospheric Science Students

By Emily Hubmer

Before coming to school at South Dakota Mines, I was interested in environmental science from a different lens than I am now. I used to love learning about and watching documentaries focused on sustainability, mostly related to agriculture and other practices in the production of goods. As a college student, my courses have focused on other topics related to environmental science. I’ve studied chemical and biological processes, community science and communication, water and wastewater treatment, among other fields. The courses I’ve taken and the fields I’ve studied have inspired my capstone project. Like most, I want to help as many people as I can and leave a positive impact on my surroundings. One way that I can help our planet, and what I will be doing my capstone project on, is composting.

A photo of hands in gloves handling compost.
Dvortygirl, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Composting is the process of breaking down materials into compost, which is a nutritionally dense substance. Typically, in landfills, when food breaks down, it is in a low-oxygen environment. The resulting byproduct of that decomposition is methane. When composted properly, the waste is exposed to oxygen, resulting in the emission of carbon dioxide. I know, an environmental science student promoting the release of carbon dioxide? While carbon dioxide is a harmful greenhouse gas, methane is also a greenhouse gas, and it is much stronger than carbon dioxide and can have a greater impact with the same amount of gas produced (Howarth, 2014). The breakdown of material into compost can benefit communities. The product can be used to help crops grow better in gardens, among other uses. Essentially, composting food waste reduces the amount of trash going into landfills, prevents methane emissions, and makes a useful end product.

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No Two Snowflakes Are Alike! Analyzing Precipitation Development of Two Different Blizzards

Atmospheric Science Students

By Kendra Rounds

Snowstorms and blizzards can have immense impacts on human infrastructure, create hazardous travel conditions, and shut down cities due to snow and ice accumulation. Many people know this in general about snowstorms but have never considered if there’s any difference between snowstorms at different times of the year.

During midwinter – in, say, January – temperatures are colder overall with less sunlight during the daytime to diminish snow accumulation. Snowflakes that form around this time may be smaller and more powder-like. This can reduce visibility more quickly during snow events such as blizzards, which makes traveling conditions more hazardous. During early spring – in, say, April – temperatures are generally warmer with more sunlight throughout the day. While this typically means the effects of a snowstorm won’t last quite as long, the snow that falls is usually thicker and heavier, often called “wet snow.” This snow is much harder to clear from roadways and can cause power outages more easily due to the weight of the snow on powerlines. Many people probably wouldn’t consider that these storms can be so different if they don’t look at the underlying meteorological properties of these storms.

Photo showing low visibility during a blizzard. Some buildings and trees are barely visible through blowing snow.
Low visibility during a blizzard in Yankton, SD, on April 14th, 2018. Photo taken by Heidi Harms Henson courtesy of the Sioux Falls, SD National Weather Service Weather Forecasting Office.
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Investigating Rapid-Onset Drought in the Great Plains

Atmospheric Science Students

By Asher Malaschak

In the summer of 2017, the Northern Great Plains experienced one of the worst droughts of recorded history. At the time of recording, 2017 was ranked as the second driest year since the start of the 20th century (Wang 2019). This drought had devastating economic and environmental impacts, including the decimation of the local agriculture industry, loss of tourism in excess of $240 million, and multiple record-breaking wildfire breakouts (Hoell 2020). The surprising thing about this drought is that, in May, 2017 was considered to be an excellent agricultural year. By the middle of July, the drought was already deemed one of the region’s worst in recent history.

As it turns out, this phenomenon is not uncommon. This is what is known as a “flash drought,” or a rapid intensification of drought within a short time period, typically a month or less. It is generally associated with very high temperatures and clear skies lasting over a long time. Flash droughts can occur during a number of circumstances but are most dangerous when combined with drought conditions that are already present. This can cause significant harm to land that has already proven vulnerable, making the jobs of farmers, wildfire management, and others much more difficult.

Photo showing cracked, dry soil.
Figure 1: Extreme drought conditions in Morocco. Houssain Tork, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I have decided to conduct research regarding flash droughts in the Northern Great Plains. The goal is to analyze the amount of coverage and the intensity of flash droughts in the past 40 years to identify how these patterns are changing. Given Earth’s ever-changing climate, it is vital to identify how climate change is affecting the frequency and severity of flash droughts. This research can also help identify the specific variables involved in climate change that are most responsible for changing the drought scene.

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Commonplace Books in the Classroom: Organizing Ideas and Making Art

art, Classes, Environment, Humanities, STS Faculty

By Christy Tidwell and Erica Haugtvedt

This semester, we both asked students in our classes (Introduction to Humanities and Environmental Literature & Culture) to create commonplace books. We found this to be a successful way to get students thinking about core ideas from class and to encourage creative activity. Read on for more information about commonplace books, how we used them, and how students responded!

What Are Commonplace Books?

Commonplace books have a long history – extending as far back as people have had easy access to paper and writing utensils – and are a way of organizing information for yourself. They can overlap with journals or diaries, but they’re also for classifying and indexing information to find later, and they have taken various shapes over time as they have served different purposes for different groups of people. Religious leaders’ commonplace books in the 17th century, for instance, look and function differently than young ladies’ commonplace books in the 19th. Adam Smyth provides a pretty standard definition of them: “the commonplace book presents a series of thematic headings under which aphorisms are distributed, gathered from reading, or, more rarely, from conversation, and deemed in some way useful or exemplary” (91).

Page from a commonplace book by author Charles Lamb (1775-1834). Public domain.

However, Smyth also notes that actual commonplace books only sometimes followed this description. He writes,

The experience of reading manuscript commonplace books is often an experience of baffled delight – delight at pages so crammed with text that annotations spill over the binding and covers; at devotional aphorisms jostling with bawdy epigrams and recipes . . . ; at scraps of printed pages glued into the manuscript; at prose merging with verse merging with financial accounts merging with illustrations; at blank pages, and gaps; at entire printed books bound into the centre of manuscripts; at the construction of a single manuscript out of many different sized pages; at the recycling of old, often medieval texts in the binding of manuscripts; at texts that simultaneously ‘begin’ from various points within their pages and    proceed in various directions, so that it becomes meaningless to talk of a front or back, a beginning or an end. (90-91)

Smyth goes on to describe this as an “eclecticism of inclusions” and “rampantly inventive materialism” (91), descriptions which beautifully highlight the flexibility and openness of commonplace books and their inherently physical nature. Both of these elements are closely tied to goals of humanities classrooms that emphasize practicing and learning about a wide range of modes of expression (e.g., film, art, literature, philosophy) and that value creators’ and students’ experiences of the world.

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Students sit at a table playing the board game while Dr. Witlacil observes.

What can games teach us about climate change?: Playing CATAN – New Energies for World Climate Games Day

Classes, Environment

By Mary Witlacil

Earlier this semester, students in Environmental Law and Policy (POLS 407) played CATAN – New Energies for the second annual Worldwide Climate Games Day. New Energies is an updated version of CATAN, where players jockey to collect enough resources to build out their society and develop their energy infrastructure. Players can choose to develop cheaper fossil fuels to collect more resources or opt for more expensive renewable energy plants. With more fossil fuel power plants the global footprint climbs higher, which increases the likelihood of triggering a natural disaster or a pollution event.

A Catan game board midway thorugh play, featuring tokens distributed across the game world.

The game gives players a choice between working collaboratively to bring down their global carbon footprint, or teaming up against each other to build out their fossil fuel energy grids. One group of students played cooperatively by trading resources with each other and exclusively building out renewable energy. Reflecting on this strategy, one student noted that the game helped them recognize the role international cooperation plays in combatting climate change.

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What Do You Love About Parks?: STS at the Earth Day Expo

Environment, Events

This past weekend, the STS program set up tables at the Earth Day Expo (held on the campus of Western Dakota Tech here in Rapid City) to share information about STS and ask visitors to think about parks as a piece of nature we regularly interact with.

With a whiteboard for sharing ideas in response to the key question – What do you love about parks? – and a table for visitors to build their ideal park, we invited lots of hands-on participation and engagement.

Parks are a great way to practice STS ways of thinking at any age, since they are intersections between natural and social spaces and they are shaped by our technologies as well as our social needs and expectations. Plus, it’s fun to play with toys, felt, and clay!

We hope to be back at the Earth Day Expo again next year!

Whiteboard with the question What do you LOVE about parks? at the top. Answers focus on beauty and education, bugs, and trees.
Some of the answers to our question about what we love about parks.
Two green felt park spaces with trees and paths and ponds and animals, etc.
Some very full park designs!
Dr. Pritchard observes children working on park design elements.
Dr. Kayla Pritchard at the table while kids build parts of a park. (Photo credit: Rapid City Municipal Government.)
A few children - seen from behind - working on park elements.
Kids working on park development.

Service Learning at Trinity Eco Prayer Park III: Choosing Native Grasses

Classes, communication

Reflections on Service Learning Lessons with Trinity Eco Prayer Park in Dr. Haugtvedt’s Fall 2025 STEM Communication for Public and Technical Audiences Course

Mario Dominguez: Restoring a Prairie, One Volunteer Step at a Time

When our class partnered with Trinity Eco Prayer Park this semester, I expected a simple clean-up project. What I discovered instead was a living example of how small ecological changes can ripple through an entire landscape. One of the most striking lessons came from learning how invasive species, especially Canada thistle, can spread quickly and choke out native grasses. These native plants aren’t just background scenery; they anchor soil, trap moisture, and support insects, birds, and even the microorganisms underground. Removing an invasive patch doesn’t just make the park look nicer, it helps restore the natural cycles that keep the prairie healthy.

Our time in the park also revealed how restoration is as much about people as plants. Every volunteer who pulled weeds or cleared debris added visible progress, but they also became connected to the ecosystem they were helping. Science communication often talks about “ecosystem services,” but seeing the concept firsthand–cleaner soil, healthier growth, and a space that brings peace to visitors–made the science feel personal. Trinity Eco Prayer Park isn’t just a project site; it’s a reminder that anyone can make a meaningful impact when they understand the science behind their actions.

By the end of the semester, our team didn’t just complete a service project, we contributed to a small but powerful example of community-driven ecological restoration. And that’s what I hope others see when they visit the park: a place where science, stewardship, and community come together to revive a prairie one season at a time.

Lucas Geiger

While our team was researching possible alternatives for the Kentucky Bluegrass lawn at Trinity Eco Prayer Park it became clear that the simplest and most sustainable solution could be found right outside of town. We thought that native South Dakota grasses like prairie dropseed, western wheatgrass and buffalo grass are naturally built for the local climate and would be great options for the park’s ideology. In their own ways, they can all handle droughts, bounce back after foot traffic and survive through large temperature swings. Creating a mix of the three seemed like the best option to maximize each species’ strengths and weaknesses. This is contrary to the existing Kentucky Bluegrass which is unable to take care of itself without significant work.

Choosing native grasses for the park isn’t just a design choice, it fits in with the park’s ecological values. These grass species will help improve the existing soil’s health, support the local insect diversity and create a landscape that changes more naturally throughout the year. Our goal for the lawn conversion was to give the park a stronger connection to South Dakota’s natural landscaping by replacing one of the last non-native areas in the park.

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An aerial view of a city showing a smoggy sky above the buildings.

Models: How accurate are they?

Atmospheric Science Students

By Ryleigh Czajkowski

I have always been curious about the weather and climate, as my dad was a pilot and used to teach me little things about the atmosphere. When I entered college, I decided to follow that curiosity by majoring in atmospheric sciences and developed a new interest in air quality along the way. Air quality is an issue that has global effects with potential detrimental impacts, and I would like to find a job that uses scientific understanding of air pollution to make impactful actions and policies. Specifically, I would like to go into pollution modeling and management to help mitigate the effects of pollution on communities and ecosystems.

This interest was sparked during an internship I had last summer as part of NASA’s Student Airborne Research Program (SARP). This experience allowed me to use airborne data to validate the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ), to see how accurately the model predicts the concentrations of different pollutants. The CMAQ model works by incorporating meteorological (wind, temperature, etc.), emission, and chemical models to simulate the concentrations of trace gases, particulate matter, and atmospheric pollutants both spatially and temporally (EPA, 2022). 

A group of people standing outside near the tail of a plane with NASA on the tail.
Property of NASA SARP. Credit: Madison Landi.

For my senior capstone project, I will be expanding on my previous research to build a better understanding of the capabilities of the model, as it recently underwent an update in 2022 to improve the meteorological processes and emissions. I will focus on the South Coast Air Basin in California, an area with known, notable air quality issues (Chen, et al., 2020) and the levels of formaldehyde and methane there. Both methane and formaldehyde act as active gases in the atmosphere. With methane concentrations on the rise (Feng, et al., 2023) and formaldehyde as a health and environmental irritant (Lucken, et al., 2018), they are important gases to study and understand. I will be assessing how well the CMAQ model can simulate the concentrations of formaldehyde and methane in the atmosphere, as well as the accuracy of  the meteorological inputs (i.e., wind) as they greatly affect the behavior and amounts of those gasses. (Barsanti, et al., 2019). 

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Reef Revival

STS Students

By Keaton Gray

I had a really hard time narrowing down a topic for my capstone. I wanted to research so many things, and as soon as I got into research on a topic I’d learn about a whole other aspect and want to switch my project. I decided to focus my capstone on reef restoration because of my obsession with their beauty, but also because they are under immediate threat due to anthropocentric (i.e., human-caused) problems like climate change and pollution. Additionally, I have seen the negative effects of coral bleaching firsthand on the reefs surrounding the Big Island of Hawaii, and seeing it just makes your heart hurt!   

Image of coral reef with small fish swimming around in it.
“Coral Reef at Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge” by USFWS Headquarters is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Restoration involves targeted efforts to repair or enhance damaged reef ecosystems. This process typically includes coral propagation and transplantation but also entails assisted evolution and assisted larvae dispersal (Boström-Einarsson et al 2020). My research focuses on two questions: 1) What are the most effective and sustainable methods for restoring coral reefs to promote reef resilience and 2) How can these strategies be applied in different coastal environments to maximize coastal protection and positively impact local communities? 

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