Day 1
- We have a guest speaker today, Carolyn Monastra, who will be talking about her phographic documentation work demonstrating the effects of climate change around the globe. More information about her work can be found at The Witness Tree.
Day 2
- Setup week 5 notes. Spend 10 minutes discussing Carolyn Monastra's presentation and documenting your reactions to it in your notes. You should include a link to website (The Witness Tree), and each of you should pick one image from the site that struck you as interesting -- you should each include a copy of that image in your notes and write a caption for it in your own words about what it depicts, why you find it interesting, and what other photographs you would be interested in seeing to give the image more context.
Continue the Present climate graphing activity
The climate of an area can be, at its most basic, considered the temperature and precipitation (rain and snow) throughout the year. The climate of an area depends on many factors such as
- northern or southern hemisphere
- high or low latitude
- near ocean or not
- high or low altitude
- shielded by mountains
Seattle and Spokane
- Look up the monthly average temperature and precipitation for Seattle and Spokane at http://www.weatherbase.com/. Read the climate summary for each city.
- What are examples of climate variables available for the two cities?
- Make a graph that has two lines plotted on it, one line for the average temperature in Seattle and one line for the temperature in Spokane. Rescale the plot to best show the data. Label your axes. Paste the graph into your notes.
- What similarities do you see in temperatures between the Seattle and Spokane?
- What differences do you see in temperatures for the two cities?
- Now make a similar graph of precipitation for the two cities. Paste it here.
- What similarities do you see in precipitation between the Seattle and Spokane?
- What differences do you see in precipitation for the two cities?
- Draw a sketch of a map of the State of Washington on a marker board. Take a picture of it and paste it in your notes.
- Based on that map what is likely to cause the similarities and differences that you see in temperature and precipitation for Seattle and Spokane?
The rest of the world
You will now look up five pairs of cities from around the world and try to determine what impact the factors listed at the beginning of this activity have on climate. You are looking for cities that are similar for all of the factors listed except one. For example, Seattle and Santiago, Chile have roughly the same altitude, latitude and are both near the coast. One way they differ is that they are in different hemispheres. Look up the monthly average weather (in other words climate) for pairs of cities from around the world using the data and climate summary from http://www.weatherbase.com/. Mark the locations of your city pairs on the map given out in class.
- You can mark the cities on the paper map you were provided (and then snap a picture of it to paste into your notes)
- Now make plots in plotly of the monthly temperature for each pair of cities just like you did for Seattle and Spokane. Make sure to rescale your plots to best show your data.
- For each pair of cities paste in the plots of temperature and then answer the following questions (Wikipedia might help here)
- City name?
- Regular and severe weather patterns (e.g. monsoons, hurricanes, etc)?
- Climate classification?
- How are the temperatures differ or similar and how is that related to the factors listed above?
Day 3
The Penny Climate Model
We're going to simulate the climate using pennies!
Debrief, for your discussion and to put in your notes:
- Draw a picture showing the main components of the penny climate model.
- What is the main source of energy for the earth to stay warm?
- Define albedo
- Describe the goldilocks phenomena that causes the earth to have a stable temperature
- What would the average temperature of the earth be like if we had no atmosphere? What is the average temperature with an atmosphere?
- Why when we build models of the climate system (or any other complicated system) would we start with the simplest model we can?
- What role does comparing data with model output have in improving a model? Give an example from the penny climate model.
- What complications have been ignored in the simple climate model?
- What did the Futurama climate model get right/wrong?
Day 4
Discussion and quiz on the present climate activity and the penny climate model
Is something unclear? Leave a comment below: