“Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish”.

Dr. Barbara Boustead will be giving a public talk on Friday, April 10 at 4pm in Bobbit Auditorium, entitled “Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About the Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish”. All are welcome and encouraged to attend this interdisciplinary event co-sponsored by Honors, E&E, and CSE.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wasn’t an official weather observer. She simply paid attention. Her life and livelihood intertwined with the weather and climate around her, inseparable. Wilder Weather reveals the accuracy of the vivid, detailed weather descriptions in her fictional Little House books—stories of blizzards and prairie fires, tornadoes and grasshoppers, floods and droughts.

Barbara Boustead is a meteorologist, climatologist, and author of the nonfiction book Wilder Weather: What Laura Ingalls Wilder Teaches Us About Weather, Climate, and Protecting What We Cherish. Her 24-year career with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration includes 22 years with the National Weather Service serving in various roles as an operational weather forecaster, climate program leader, and instructor. She now works in NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research as a Heat Services Program Manager for the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) program.