Category: Weather

Flying into the Eye of a Storm

10/5/2021

Vicki Cobb

The Master Chef of Kids’ Hands-On Science

Dr. Hugh Willoughby, of Florida International University, was one of the first meteorologists to ever fly into the eye of a hurricane.  Now the job is done by the Hurricane Hunters—a team of pilots, navigators and meteorologists who fly into these dangerous storms to help keep us safe.  Here’s what I learned when I interviewed Hugh Willoughby:

What is a hurricane eye?

Hurricanes are circular storms so the wind blows around in a circle. The eye is the center of a hurricane.  If a circular storm doesn’t have an eye, it is not a hurricane—it’s a tropical storm.  The eye is surrounded by a ring of clouds called the eyewall. Within the eye, there is a calm area that is cloudless all the way up to space.   The winds are strongest just at the inner edge of the eyewall, which is composed of violent thunderstorms with strong updrafts and downdrafts.   The hurricane pinwheels out from the eyewall as spiral bands of wind and rain, which stretch for miles.  When a hurricane’s eye passes over land, the storm suddenly stops and the sun comes out.  But the relief is short-lived as the other side of the storm soon slams into the area.

How do Hurricane Hunters help us?

Hurricane Hunters fly into the eye of hurricanes that are heading towards our shores to help predict where the storm will make landfall.  On every mission they must find the center of the storm at least twice and at most four times over a period of several hours because the change in position of the center of the eye tells us the direction the storm is moving and how fast it is moving. They also drop packages called dropsondes that contain measuring instruments for air pressure, humidity, and wind speed at the eyewall.  These measurements tell us the destructive power of the storm or its “category.” During a hurricane season (from June 1 to November 30) the Hurricane Hunters and their fleet of ten airplanes can get data on three storms, twice a day.  So flying into a hurricane’s eye is pretty routine for them.

Is it dangerous?

The planes can easily handle changes in air pressure and wind speeds that create “bumps” and it can be pretty bumpy going through the eyewall.   But, in more than sixty years there have been only four accidents. All on board agree that the view of the eyewall from inside the eye is worth it! The plane has transported them inside nature’s most magnificent amphitheater.
(c) Vicki Cobb 2014

Harvey and Irma have alerted everyone to the dangers of a hurricane. We can predict the course of a hurricane by flying into a hurricane and repeatedly measuring wind speed, humidity, air pressure, and temperature. Here's a video that will give you a taste of what it looks like as you approach an eye wall. It is filmed from a plane penetrating Hurricane Katrina.

When you hear about a Category "3" hurricane, or any other category number, the Saffir-Simpson Scale tells you just what that number means.

Look at the amazing number of instruments contained in a Dropsonde.

Vicki Cobb's latest book, How Could We Harness a Hurricane? shows how the scientific understanding of air, water and energy come together to form hurricanes. It includes lots of hands-on activities that you can do. Engineers look at science and try and figure out ways the steer a hurricane away from populated areas or weaken them. There are lots of questions in the book and some of them don't have answers, yet.

MLA 8 Citation
Cobb, Vicki. "Flying into the Eye of a Storm." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 18 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ flying-into-the-eye-of-a-storm.

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The Magician of Iron

4/13/2021

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Roxie Munro
Visual Thinker

The great Paris tower was underway. From each corner of a broad base the size of a football field, four spidery iron structures rose, curving inward in one majestic sweep toward the middle. The construction – a web of connecting girders – called for 300 workers to assemble some 15,000 pieces of iron and snap 2.5 million rivets into place. This would be the world’s tallest man-made structure, reaching a height of 300 meters (934 feet). A glorious demonstration of engineering, it was conceived by Gustave Eiffel, the most illustrious engineer of nineteenth-century France.

The tower was to be the focal point of the International Exhibition of Paris in 1889, commemorating the 100th birthday of the French Revolution. After that, since it had no practical use, it was to be torn down.

It took two years, two months, and three days to build the Eiffel Tower. Eiffel used wrought iron, which was a relatively new building material at the time, used primarily for bridges and aqueducts. As the tower rose, becoming the city’s most prominent feature, not everyone approved. “Useless and monstrous,” one newspaper called it. Another described it as an “odious column of bolted metal.”

Called the Magician of Iron, Eiffel’s mathematical prowess and attention to detail was legendary. To put the tower project on paper took 30 draftsmen working full time for 18 months. Every rivet of the 2.5 million needed for the structure had its designated place, down to a fraction of a millimeter.

The Tower became the hit of the International Exhibition, with nearly two million people visiting it. Still, not everyone loved this prodigious web of steel girders. A famous writer was once asked why he ate lunch there every day, since he was known to hate the sight of it. He replied, “Because it’s the only place in Paris where I can’t see the damn thing.”

So why wasn’t the Eiffel Tower torn down? It almost was. What saved it was the radio broadcasting center and the weather station that Eiffel installed at the top.

Now France’s most famous landmark, it is not the only national symbol that Eiffel was involved with. He also built the iron skeleton of a lady we’re all familiar with: The Statue of Liberty.

As for the Eiffel Tower, “I ought to be jealous of that tower,” he once said. “She is more famous than I am.”

The Eiffel Tower under construction highlights the intricacy of the design as well as the massive size of the project in relation to the city of Paris. Art by Roxie Munro

After dark during the 1889 Exposition, the newly-opened tower was lit by hundreds of gas lamps, and a beacon sent out three beams of red, white and blue light. Georges Garen via Wikimedia Commons

The Parisian art community criticized the tower even before it was built, calling it "a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, Eiffel responded, "The tower will be the tallest building that men have ever built. ...And why would that which is admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris? ". Wikimedia Commons

Eiffel's most famous works are still major tourist attractions in the 21st century. The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world. An average of 25,000 people ascend the tower every day. Approximately four million people visit New York's Statue of Liberty National Monument and Ellis Island each year. Photo Benh Lieu Song viia Wikimedia Commons. Art by Roxie Munro

One of Roxie's most recent, Masterpiece Mix, is a book about art. As an artist searches for inspiration, she explores thirty-seven paintings of different genres, and comes up with a grand finale, using all of them. The book has "smart, concise, marvelously amplifying backmatter" (Kirkus), a dedicated web page, and free downloads.

MLA 8 Citation
Munro, Roxie. "The Magician of Iron." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 7 Mar.
2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/The-Magician-of-Iron.

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Hopping Ahead of Climate Change

1/14/2021

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Sneed B. Collard III

Connecting Scientists and Kids

Earth’s temperatures are getting warmer. In fact, sixteen of the seventeen hottest years on record have occurred since the year 2000. These warmer temperatures are driving larger, long-term changes in our planet’s weather and climate. Scientists refer to these changes as “climate change.”

In a few places, climate change might be welcome, but around the world, warmer temperatures and other changes are leading to a host of problems from rising sea levels to more extreme weather events and the spread of harmful human diseases.

Professor Scott Mills, from the University of Montana, wanted to see how climate change might be affecting one particular animal called the snowshoe hare.

Snowshoe hares live in regions of North America that receive snow every winter. The hares, in fact, change their coat color from brown to white and back again every year. This helps camouflage them against their background—and hides them from the eyes of lynx, owls, and other hungry predators.

  Here’s the thing: snowshoe hares can’t choose when they molt, or change their coat color. Molt timing is controlled by their genes, which are part of the DNA inside their bodies. If a hare’s genes make it molt to white in October, but snow doesn’t fall until December, the hare will stick out like a light bulb against the brown earth. And that’s a problem. Why? Because almost everywhere on earth, the length of time with snow on the ground is growing shorter and shorter.

  To find out if shorter winters might harm hare populations, Scott and his team spent three years tagging and following hares. They measured how many were born, how many died, and what they died from. They also recorded whether the hares were matched or mismatched against their backgrounds.

  They discovered that predators killed mismatched hares significantly more often than hares whose coats match their backgrounds. Scott and his team also calculated that over the next one hundred years, this greater mortality, or death rate, could lead to the decline or disappearance of many snowshoe hare populations.

  The good news? Different hares molt at different times. This may help some hare populations adapt to shorter winters and longer periods without snow.

  Hares are not the only animals affected by shorter winters. More than twenty species of animals including lemmings, weasels, hamsters, and Arctic foxes change their coat colors every year. Scott’s research helps us predict what might happen to these animals—and decide what we can do to protect them.

Scott’s discoveries about Montana snowshoe hares, together with experts’ predictions about our future climate, indicate that hares will be mismatched between 5-½ and 10 weeks by the end of this century.

Before tagging and putting a radio collar on a snowshoe hare, Professor Mills and his team must weigh and measure it.

This snowshoe hare has been tagged and fitted with a radio collar—and is now ready to help scientists learn more about snowshoe hare survival.

Even from a great distance, a mismatched hare stands out like a glowing light bulb. (Photo Courtesy of L. Scott Mills research laboratory)

Besides serving as popular prey for predators, snowshoe hares are irresistibly cute. This is a young hare, also called a leveret.

Sneed B. Collard III is the author of more than eighty award-winning books, many focusing on science and the natural world. His entertaining memoir Snakes, Alligators, and Broken Hearts—Journeys of a Biologist’s Son recounts his challenges and adventures growing up as the son of divorced biologist parents, and the experiences that would one day lay the foundation for his writing career. He is a dynamic speaker and offers school and conference programs that combine science, nature, and literacy. To learn more about him and his talks, visit his website, www.sneedbcollardiii.com.
This book was reviewed by Vicki Cobb in the Huffington Post: "The Cheeseburger of the Forest".

MLA 8 Citation
Collard, Sneed B., III. "Hopping Ahead of Climate Change." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 15 Nov. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/hopping-ahead-of-climate-change.

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Damping Down Danger

4/30/2020

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Sneed B. Collard III

Connecting Science and Kids

Several years ago, I rode the world’s fastest elevator to the top of one of the world’s tallest buildings—Taipei 101. Shaped like an elegant stalk of bamboo, Taipei 101 soars 1670 feet above the island nation of Taiwan. However, the engineers who designed the building faced two monumental challenges. The first is that dozens of earthquakes shake Taiwan each year. The second is that in an average year, Taiwan gets hammered by three or four hurricanes, or typhoons.

            How, engineers wondered, could they keep people comfortable inside Taipei 101 when it swayed back and forth? More important, how could they keep the building from getting damaged or collapsing in a massive earthquake or 100 mile-per-hour winds?

            One solution: a damper ball.

            Damping devices are weighty objects that can reduce the motion of a bridge, building, or other structure. In the case of Taipei 101, engineers placed the damper ball near the top of the building—the part that sways the most. The ball is hung from thick cables inside the building and rests on giant springs or “dampers.”

            One of Isaac Newton’s basic laws of physics is that an object at rest tends to stay at rest—and the damper ball proves it. Every time Taipei 101 starts swaying, the damper ball wants to stay where it is and “pulls back” on the building, reducing how far the building moves. When the building sways in the opposite direction, the process repeats itself—but in the reverse direction. Of course the building also pulls on the damper ball, but the ball’s movements are restricted by the dampers it presses against.

            Does the system work? You bet. The damper ball inside of Taipei 101 reduces the building’s movement by 30 to 40 percent!

            Of course not just any damping device could protect an enormous building like Taipei 101. Taipei’s damper ball weighs 1.5 million pounds—as much as two fully-loaded jumbo jets. It is composed of 41 circular steel plates that stand taller than a one-story house. In 2008, when a giant earthquake hit mainland China, the people of Taiwan could feel it hundreds of miles away. The damper ball did its job, resisting Taipei 101’s movement, keeping the building safe. During Typhoon Soudelor in 2015, the damper again worked like a charm, protecting the building against 100- to 145-mile-per-hour winds.

            Besides protecting Taipei 101, the damper ball has become a major tourist attraction. Each year, thousands of visitors ride to the 89th floor. They take selfies next to the damper ball. They even take “Damper Baby” souvenirs home with them. If you’re ever lucky enough to visit Taiwan, check it out!

Left: Taipei 101 is a landmark skyscraper in Taipei, Taiwan. The building was officially classified as the world's tallest in 2004, and remained such until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai in 2010. Alton Thompson, Wikimedia Commons
Above: The damper is a steel sphere 18 feet across. Supported by eight steel cables, it swings like a pendulum. Armand du Plessis, Wikimedia Commons

The damper ball is visible between the 89th and 91st floor of Taipei 101 and has become an attraction for tourists.

Sneed B. Collard III is author of more than eighty award-winning children’s books as well as a new book for educators, Teaching Nonfiction Revision: A Professional Writer Shares Strategies, Tips, and Lessons.
Sneed is a dynamic speaker and offers school and conference programs that combine science, nature, and literacy. To learn more about him and his talks, visit his website,.
To learn more about the damper ball and watch how it performed during Typhoon Soudelor, check out this article and video: http://www.thorntontomasetti.com/taipei-101s-tmd-explained/

MLA 8 Citation
Collard, Sneed B. "Damping Down Danger." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 10
01 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
Damping-Down-Danger.

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Climate Change: The Facts and the Consequences

4/21/2020

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Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
Nature’s Animal Ambassador

The polar jet stream can travel at speeds greater than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). Here, the fastest winds are colored red; slower winds are blue. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

No one can honestly deny that our climate has been changing in recent years. Before the winter of 2018-2019, California had only a year’s water supply stored in its reservoirs. Wildfires have become an annual threat throughout much of the west, while the Midwest and East Coast have experienced record-setting winters. These problems are due to complex interactions among temperature, winds, and water currents.

A major change is the warming of the atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere has been getting warmer since the late 1800s, when factories started spewing out carbon dioxide. Because natural variations also affect the temperature, a graph showing the temperature over time is a jagged line. But the trend is consistently upward and follows the graph of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activities. That’s strong enough evidence that we are at least a large part of the problem, and the vast majority of climate scientists are urging countries of the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.

A major player in the world’s weather is the jet stream, which helps circulate the atmosphere around the world about every two weeks. This flow of fast-moving air speeds across North America from west to east, separating cold arctic air from warmer, more southerly air. The jet stream used to run in a fairly direct arc across the northern United States. But in recent years it has become less stable, dipping southward in the eastern U.S. to bring frigid winters to the Northeast while arching northward in the West, carrying warm, dry air there. Scientists believe that the rapid melting of the Arctic ice brought about by global warming is part of the cause for the jet stream’s instability.  However, climate trends are controlled more by the oceans. Scientists estimate 95% of the heat from global warming is being stored in the oceans, increasing water temperatures even into the depths.

As global warming continues, so will climate change. The melting of sea ice and glaciers is already raising the sea level. While scientists don’t blame climate change for devastating Hurricane Sandy, Sandy’s extreme coastal flooding was made worse by the increase in sea level that’s already occurred. As time goes on, coastal cities around the world will be at increasing risk for more severe storm damage.

Because warm air holds more moisture than cold air, storms are becoming more severe, increasing blizzards and flooding storms. Some agricultural regions that depend on reliable rainfall may soon be unable to grow crops, disrupting the food supply.

Climate change is complicated, but because it affects us all, we need to learn about it.  The Environment Protection Agency has questions and answers about climate change.

Oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and contain 97% of the water on our planet. This chart shows how this water has absorbed the vast majority of the increased atmospheric heat due to global warming.

This chart shows how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased since 1960. The measurements are made near the top of Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii, thousands of miles away from any land-based major pollution.

Calculations of global warming prepared in or before 2001 from a range of climate models. The projections assume no action is taken to reduce emissions.

Yellowstone National Park’s majestic geologic wonders and remarkable wildlife draw millions of visitors each year. But there was a time when these natural treasures were in great danger, all because after years of unrestricted hunting, one key piece of the puzzle had been eliminated—the wolf.

Now, more than a decade after scientists realized the wolves’ essential role and returned them to Yellowstone, the park’s natural balance is gradually being restored. Dorothy Hinshaw Patent's text supplemented by spectacular full-color photographs show the wolves in the natural habitat that was almost lost without them. Click here to find out more.

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation
Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw. "Climate Change: The Facts and the Consequences."
     Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 17 Apr. 2018,
     www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
     Climate-Change-The-Facts-and-the-Consequences.

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Flying into the Eye of a Storm

The Magician of Iron

Hopping Ahead of Climate Change

Damping Down Danger

Climate Change: The Facts and the Consequences

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