Everywhere you go, you always take the Weather with you

Knowledge and understanding about weather has always been a key requirement for professionals in the outdoors, whether this centres on aspects of safety or as important place and environmental based curriculum. One of the key dilemmas in our teaching of weather to undergraduate students has focussed on how much meteorological understanding an outdoor education graduate requires to enact effective place-based teaching and safe decision making or if the provision of packaged information from weather services will suffice.

We offer specific examples of current day professional understandings and capabilities of our graduates from both these perspectives. We aim to update the profession on how recent developments in society has changed how we access and process weather information for safe practice, and how these shifts are often to the detriment of understanding weather as environmental curriculum and meteorological knowledge, which has the potential to ultimately limit our overall focus on the safety of groups in the outdoors.

https://www.outdoorsvictoria.org.au/news-events/outdoors-victoria-conference-2025/program-timetable/