Each team of 6 students has its own Editor-In-Chief, Hurricane Specialist, Meteorologist, Natural Hazards Planner, Reporter, and Environmental Scientist. As this team receives daily information on the hurricane bearing down on its coastal city, decisions must be made. Action must be taken! The public must be informed! Teaching
Suggestions From The Field
A "pdf" file containing web
sites, books, material lists, and correlations with
National Science Education Standards. If you are a teacher who is about to do the Science Activity called Hurricane Tracking, we have created a tool called Update Tracking Data. It is an MSWord file that presents tracking data for Day 8 through Day 13. Download the file and print out the three pages. Then cut out and glue the appropriate weather maps from Hurricane! Teacher Guide page 43 onto Update Tracking Data. Two maps will fit on each page. Make transparencies from these pages and use the transparencies to present additional tracking data as your students complete the activity. EBS Breaking News
2009 Atlantic Hurricane Names Hurricanes are named alphabetically. The first tropical storm or hurricane of the year has a name that begins with "A" and the second is given the name that begins with "B." Each year's list contains names that begin from A to W, but exclude names that begin with Q and U. Beginning in 1953, the National Hurricane Center has publishes a new list of names for tropical storms and hurricanes. The first lists had only female names; but since 1979, the lists have alternated between male and female names. Six lists of names are used. These lists rotate unchanged unless there is a devastating hurricane. When that happens, the name of that hurricane is retired and another name replaces it. Underlined names below are linked to the
tracking map for that Hurricane.
Are you and your students tracking a hurricane? Are you trying to predict whether or not it will strengthen or weaken? You can use a wind shear map to help you. Wind Shear can cause a hurricane to weaken! Wind shear is the result of streams of air flow at different altitudes. It ranges from a low of 0 to 5 to highs of 40-50. For example, if there is an easterly flow of air at 30 mph at 40,000 ft., and a westerly flow of air at 25mph at 20,000 ft., the wind shear is 5. High wind shears tend to disrupt smaller tropical depressions as they are forming. Wind Shear Map You can look at a map of current wind shear here. You may find it hard to figure out at first. This may help:
Correction Alert A wording problem has been found in the "Cloud Formation" Discovery File on page 5: "These tiny droplets condense onto solid particles ...", although correct could be misread as the already formed droplets collecting around particles rather than the original condensation of the droplets occurring onto the particles. Similarly with "additional water droplets attach themselves to the surrounding particles". Another problem was found in the figure on page 36. The cross-section shown for the stationary front is actually a cross-section of an occluded front which is one in which a cold front has caught up with a warm front thus lifting all the warm air off the ground as shown in the figure. A stationary front is one that still has warm air at the ground on one side and cold air on the other side (as suggested by the map symbol) and thus could turn into a warm front or a cold front if it starts moving. Thanks to Dr. Steven Carson (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) of NOAA) for catching these errors and providing the correct information.Building and Testing A Hurricane Resistant Building Roger Johnson (science teacher, Maplewood Middle School, Maplewood, NJ) has designed a great new activity to go with Hurricane! Click here to read about his activity: Hurricane-Resistant Building Design Seeing Into the Heart of a HurricaneDespite the forecasts that Hurricane Opal would hit their town in a little more than 24 hours, the residents of Pensacola, Florida, remained relatively calm on October 3, 1995. They pulled their boats out of the water, boarded up the beachfront businesses and went about their daily routines, fearing no more than perhaps a few fallen trees and a missed day of work. At that time, the National Hurricane Center predicted that Opal would remain a Category 1 storm, packing peak winds of around 90 miles per hour---a veritable creampuff as far as hurricanes go. Then overnight, as the hurricane moved across the Gulf of Mexico towards the city, something happened that no one predicted. The hurricane gathered energy from some then unseen reserves, jumped up in intensity to a strong Category 4 storm with peak winds of 150 mph, and threatened to turn Pensacola into a deluge of seawater and rain. The whole region went into a frenzy. The residents gathered what they could, evacuated their homes, and lined up bumper to bumper on Interstate 110 in an effort to flee. What happened to the forecast and the forecasters? Get the answer from NASA's Earth Observatory.
As with all Event-Based Science modules, much of the information you need is provided in Hurricane!. To help you further, the section below contains a list of World-Wide Web sites where additional information about hurricanes is available. Point to and click on the highlighted words to be linked with stormy web pages. (Links are checked monthly. They were working on the date of the last update.)
For links to other Event-Based Science books and pages, return to the EBS homepage: Developed by Frank Weisel Maintained by Russ Wright <webmaster@eventbasedscience.com> | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hurricane!
is an Event-Based Science module about one
of the most devastating weather events
that people can experience. Our story
focuses on the devastation that
Hurricane Andrew brought to South
Florida in August, 1992. This storm
destroyed 25,524 homes, damaged 101,241
more, left 250,000 people homeless and 54
dead.
Click
here to use Google News to search and
browse 4,500 continuously updated news
sources for breaking news about hurricanes
and weather.
