MetEd: Meteorology Education and Training. Operated by the COMET Program

COMET® began to deliver online education and training in 1997. Since that time, our website usage has increased dramatically. Today we deliver over 1,500,000 user sessions per year. Our sponsoring agencies support COMET® efforts to make our online training freely available, and they have asked COMET® to collect better user statistics. The best way to develop this information, and improve our services, is to implement a mandatory registration system. Everything on the MetEd Website will continue to be available to you at no cost. All of us at COMET® appreciate your cooperation and your support, and we hope you will continue to use the education and training that we make available through the MetEd website.

Tim Spangler
Director

If you are already registered as a user on our voluntary registration system, you will be asked to add/change some of your information. We've expanded the "affiliation" field, so you may need to add some additional information to complete that category. We also added "Country" as a required field, and included a mandatory check box which you must check (for legal reasons) to confirm you are at least 13 years of age.

We've also changed the way we handle passwords. We've added links to enable you to request a new password automatically. It will be sent to you via e-mail and you are urged to change it to something you can remember as soon as you log in again.

Finally, we've made the site more secure by adding SSL authentication over the https protocol to ensure the information you've provided to us is encrypted over the internet.

All of your previous quiz scores will still be available to you, provided you do not change your user ID (your e-mail address).

Our goal is to make the information you provide to us as secure as possible. Registration information, including user profiles will be protected using a secure (https) connection and passwords are encrypted before transfer to our data base. Because of this, we cannot send you your password if you forget it. Instead, we will create a new one and send it to you via e-mail. You'll need to change that password immediately.

Our data bases are housed within the UCAR security perimeter, and are not acessible by outside computers.

We ask for a minimal amount of required information: e-mail address, affiliation, and the country in which you live. Names and other fields are optional although we suggest adding your first and last name if you desire to have any certificates of completion created when you pass module quizzes. All information you provide will be used only to develop user demographics. User data will be reported to COMET sponsors only on an aggregate basis with no personal, individual information identified. No individual information will be released without your explicit permission. You will have the option to forward your quiz scores and list of modules completed to your supervisor, instructor, or any other e-mail address.

Your account information, including your password and supervisor email, may be changed, rescinded, or deleted at any time by simply editing your account information. To edit, click the "Change my account information" link on the login page.

Several pages associated with the registration process, including the MetEd home page, have an "Account Login" button located in the black banner near the top of the page.

You can use this to log in, or simply navigate to a module to bring up the login page. Once you log in, the banner will show your user name and a "log out" button will appear.

Other than shutting down your browser completely, this is the only way for you to log out of the registration system.

If you are unable to log in after clicking on a link to the MetEd web site, please type:

https://www.meted.ucar.edu/loginForm.php

directly into your browser. Sometimes a problem occurs when trying to follow a link directly to the MetEd site.

If you forget your password, simply click on "Forgot your password?" located in the "Member Login" section of the login page.

Even if you access MetEd modules through the NOAA LMS, you will need to have a MetEd account. You will also need to log into MetEd prior to using a module even if you are already logged into the NOAA LMS. We do not currently share information automatically with the NOAA LMS. However, we do ask you to submit your NOAA LMS user ID for potential future needs.

Note that as in the past, NOAA users should take module quizzes via the Commerce Learning Center to receive credit (https://doc.learn.com/noaa/nws).

It should be noted, if you log out or close your browser down while taking a quiz, all quiz answers you've saved will be retained in our data base so you can pick up where you left off the next time you log in and navigate to that quiz.

Most of the errors we've seen with our registration system have been easy to rectify:

• Clear your cache
• Close your browser completely (File -> Exit, rather than the "X" in the upper right corner)
• Open your browser, log in again, and continue with your quiz taking or module browsing.

Most likely, all quiz answers you've saved will be retained in our database so you can pick up where you left off after reopening your browser.

For all technical support questions regarding the use of the MetEd website or modules, please see our Support page or contact: support@comet.ucar.edu

For general questions, comments or more information about the MetEd Website, contact:

The COMET Program
P.O. Box 3000
Boulder, CO 80307-3000

phone: 303-497-8470
fax: 303-497-8491
e-mail: info@comet.ucar.edu

FedEx packages can be sent to 3450 Mitchell Lane, Boulder, CO 80301.

There are two ways to get updates from COMET: via email or RSS. Our email updates are sent whenever we publish a new module or if we have news of interest to the COMET/MetEd community. Our RSS feed is only updated when we publish a new module. Visit our COMET/MetEd Updates page to subscribe.