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Earthworks
Earth System Science for Secondary Teachers
Operation Weather Station
Who: 60+ Grade 9 General Science Students split into teams. Each team will be assigned specific dates for data collection, logging of conditions posting on the weatherboard, and morning weather broadcast on the announcements.
When: Daily, throughout the school year.
What: An ongoing study of the local weather conditions in Bridgeport, CT, plus a comparison to larger regional weather systems. The weather station plus Internet data will be used to monitor and predict weather. Information will be shared with a local cable station for their morning weather reports.
Where: School Weather Station
Why: To increase students' knowledge of weather, climate, and conditions necessary to life on Earth. To develop/learn data collection skills, science process skills, prediction and math/graphing skills. To increase understanding of seasonal and daily variations (and their causes) and to be able to compare these conditions to those on other planets.
Materials:
- Davis Weather station + sensors "add on" equipped with Weatherlink software, plus additional software that will post info on internet
- Weatherboard, cloud charts, celestial hemispheres, data logs
Barriers:
- Weather station needs to be cleaned, calibrated, repaired
- Find $ to purchase additional sensors
- Finding reliable means of transferring data to local TV station
Methods: Weekly teams will collect, post, log, analyze, and broadcast weather information. Students will plot graphs looking for possible correlations (temp vs. time, humidity vs. time, UV light vs. temp, etc.). This data will be collected and, at the end of the year, the data will be used to teach diurnal and seasonal cycles. The data will be made available to Gr. 11/12 Astronomy students (who will be completing scientific research projects).
Creative Writing: Use data for comparison of Earth to other planets. Have students write weather forecasts for other planets.
Competition: (Prediction) Who will come closest to guessing the day's high/low temp, weather, rainfall, etc.
Health: Contact Bridgeport Hospital for emergency room visits for asthma. Compare this data to weather data (pollen count and Air Quality Index).
Math: Graphing of data, plus calculations of monthly/yearly mode, median, mean.
Astronomy: Students will also log sunrise/sunset, moon phase and tides (Data used when teaching these units).
Creative Writing #2:
What would Earth be like if:
- There was no axis tilt?
- We were closer to the sun"
- We didn't rotate daily?
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