Davis Instruments Weather Club
June 2002

Dear Weather Club Member,

Welcome to the June edition of our Weather Club e-news!

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Here’s a quick preview of this month’s contents
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Be a Beta Tester for Weatherlink 5.2! . . . Do You Want Jam On That Rain Forecast? . . . Peanuts and Crackerjacks for Our Vantage Pro. . . Those Birds Keeping Dropping By. . . The Flap Over Fluttering Flags. . . Tornado Targets: What's Your Twister Risk?. . .Monitor II Makes a Cameo In "Extreme Quest". . . Techy Teacher Mike Coon Has a Roomful of Eleven-Year-Old Weather Pros. . . Teachers, NWA May Grant $500 for Your Weather Unit. . . You're Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions . . . Who You Gonna Call? Davis! . . . Enjoy!

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Do You Want Jam On That Rain Forecast?
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Just when we thought we were the supreme beings of clever weather inventions, we read that a British student has designed a toaster with an embedded Java device that burns the weather forecast into your morning toast. Really. See the story at http://theregister.co.uk/content/2/18016.html.

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Peanuts and Crackerjacks for Our Vantage Pro
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San Francisco's KNBR Radio, "the voice of the Giants," knows how important the weather can be to the outcome of a baseball game. That's why they have a Davis Vantage Pro weather station providing constant, real-time weather information about the PacBell Stadium neighborhood. The "weather ticker" is up and running on their website at http://www.knbr.com/Giants/index.asp.

Giants fans can check the site before a game to decide whether or not to wear shorts or take a rain jacket, and also to make some guesses about how the weather will affect their favorite players' games. We're not betting folks around here, but if we were, and if we were going to put a hard-earned buck on a professional baseball game, we'd want to know everything we could about the weather on the day of the game. Sure, standings, batting averages, injured players list, and that kind of thing might enter into the equation, but we'd also want to know about the wind speed and direction, humidity, temperature and, to a lesser extent, air pressure.

Over the past several months we've debated how much the altitude, and hence, lower pressure, in Denver affects the distance of homerun hit. While high altitude venues definitely make a difference, day-to-day pressure changes at any particular stadium probably don't make much of one.

Temperature and humidity both affect the game because increasing either one lowers the density of the air, which means less "drag" on the ball. In the case of temperature, a ball that would sail 400 feet at 75º would go another 8 feet at 95º.

But the single most important thing we should consider, according to The Sports Weather Page, is wind. Even a nice breeze of 15 mph, ruffling out toward center field, could add 45 feet to that 400-foot hit. Watch out, you boaters in McCovey Cove!

Check out http://www.sportsweatherpage.com/baseball_weather.htm. But see if you can answer Question 1 (below) before you do!

Weather Check Quiz Question 1: We know that humid air is less dense than dry air, and so the ball ought to go farther on a humid day than on a very dry day. But, in reality, we see the opposite. Why?

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Those Birds Keeping Dropping By
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Dave Erdman, of Coral Springs, Florida, is a high-tech guy with a low-tech solution. When birds decided that his old rooftop rain collector looked just like an avian Port-o-Potty, he reduced its appeal as such by using electrical tape to attach 2" stainless steel sewing pins around the top edge. An excellent solution with a very low price tag. His new Vantage Pro didn't have to be fitted with a pin-crown, however, because he installed it lower on his house, where birds don't care to sit.

Now that we've solved the bird-dropping problem, another Floridian, Terry Stick, has yet another problem. This one is caused not by birds but by man-made restrictions. He writes that he wants to install his new Vantage Pro Plus before hurricane season hits, but he lives in a three-story, deed-restricted townhouse with no access to the roof. He has to find a place to install the rain collector and anemometer without violating the deed restrictions. He could use the advice of anyone who has faced this kind of problem before he goes to his Board of Directors to ask for approval.

A couple of years ago, Julius Gresham had the same problem. His Board said no to his request to mount the station on the roof. Julius sent us this photo of his solution.

Weather Check Quiz Question 2: Florida, the land of sunshine, orange juice, and balmy days by the sea. Also the land of killer lightning. How many Floridians have died from lightning strikes? Which state comes in a distant second in lightning strike deaths? Which state has the least?

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The Flap Over Fluttering Flags
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June 14 is Flag Day in the U.S., and this year Americans will be celebrating Old Glory with more pride and passion than ever. We imagine that no matter where you live, the flag that represents your history and the struggles and achievements of your people makes you feel that same sense of pride.

But next time you see your flag whipping away in a brisk breeze, ask yourself this simple question: Why does it snap and flap like that? Why doesn't it just stream out straight with the wind rather than flapping? Now that we think of it, we are curious as to why we never thought to wonder about this before, and now that we have, it'll drive us crazy until we understand it!

Scientists, who have been able to describe worm-holes in space, catalog plant species that went extinct before the dinosaurs, and clone one sheep from another, have this to say about flag flapping, "Hmmmmm, we're not quite sure why it does that."

Flag-flapping, along with the origin of the universe, is something of a mystery. In a San Francisco Chronicle story by Keay Davidson, physicist Greg Huber of the University of Massachusetts says that flag-flapping poses one of "the essential difficulties of the general problem of elastohydrodynamics," (the study of deformable bodies in air or liquid flow). Another scientist, Jun Zhang, of New York University, has spent many happy hours studying this issue. Zhang and his colleagues created a simplified working model: a silk thread suspended over a fast-flowing soap film. The thread, like the flag, flaps when a mild current is induced in the film. In their research, reported in Nature 408 (Dec. 14):835, the scientists discovered that the thread created vortices, but the direction of the vortices changed with the length of the filament. While flags aren't threads, and they aren't usually displayed underwater or on a soapy film, Zhang and his colleagues believe their work sheds light on why flags curl up and snap open again in a fast-flowing current of air.

Zhang and his colleagues found that shorter filaments stretched out straight with the flow, and the researchers couldn't even help them to flap by nudging them with currents. But slightly longer filaments, when nudged, jumped to a stable flapping state. In the straight out state, the researchers noticed that the filament produced "a train of vortices" - alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise, spinning out from its free end. But when the filament was in the stable flapping state, the adjacent vortices tended to rotate in the same direction.

When the researchers used a very long filament, they found it always flaps, and never could be induced to stay in the stretched out state, and only the free end oscillates. Why? Well, now we're into the mystery. Here is where the complexities of fluid dynamics and the added complicating effects of tension, mass and filament elasticity as the filament interacts with the flow still confound the researchers.

Suffice it to say that this Flag Day, none of us will ever take that grand and patriotic "flap!" for granted.

Need more elastohyrdodynamics and flag-flapping information? Check out http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/staff/fitt/sailer.html which offers an animated graph of the theory, as well as a lovely, very mathematical expression, and http://physicsweb.org/article/news/4/12/8.

Weather Check Quiz Question 3: If you took the April Weather Check Quiz, you know what the scientific study of the physical features of the moon is called. Another equally useful word refers to the study of flags. What is it? (We know it's not a weather question. Stop whining and answer the question.)

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Tornado Targets: What's Your Twister Risk?
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If your mobile home was right in the very center of Tornado Alley, in the exact spot more likely than any to see tornadoes, how well would you sleep tonight?

As it turns out, you could probably sleep like a baby because a new model predicts the likelihood of your roof being removed by a twister at one in 4,000 years.

When meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, set out to establish a tornado risk map, they realized that the big problem was that historical data on tornadoes had only been gathered for about 75 years - not nearly enough for useful statistical predictions. The data, from about 10,000 tornadoes that hit the nation between 1921 and 1995, showed that though the number of twisters varied from year to year, the average number increased each year. Why? Probably not, they assert, because there actually ARE more tornadoes, but because there are more people living where tornadoes hit and therefore more tornadoes documented.

The scientists, including Harold E. Brooks, used the data to create a computer simulation that generated a fairly realistic mix of 4 million tornadoes over 30,000 years.

The simulation showed a range of one "hit" in 4,000 years for southeastern Oklahoma to one in 5 million years for Nevada. (Nevadans perhaps should not gloat, the scientists note, because the number may be skewed by the fact that Nevada twisters are so rare and the data we have is from a very short length of time.)

The model provided a Tornado Zone map from which you can ascertain the risk of tornado in your neck of the woods. For the whole, fascinating story, read Tornado Alley, USA, by Sid Perkins in Science News Online. Its address is http://www.sciencenews.org/20020511/bob9.asp.

Weather Check Quiz Question 4: If your house had to be in the path of a tornado, would you pick the little skinny funnel or that really huge one?

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Monitor II Makes a Cameo In "Extreme Quest"
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One of our UK readers, David Mappin, was delighted to spot a Davis Weather Monitor II in "Extremes," a film about the most extreme (hottest, coldest, driest, etc) places on earth, when it aired last year in the UK. Keo Films, who made the film, told us it would be airing in the US in June on the National Geographic channel. We found that "Extreme Quest" was listed on the National Geographic channel schedule, and we are planning to watch and see if that's the film in which our Monitor II steals the show. The dates are June 12, 13, and 19. To find the National Geographic Channel in your area, click on http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/.

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Techy Teacher Mike Coon Has a Roomful of Eleven-Year-Old Weather Pros
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When we spoke to science and math teacher Mike Coon a few months ago, it was during a rare, quiet moment in his day. He didn't have a class to teach at the moment, so he was relaxing with a few first graders who were working on their Power Point presentations instead of playing out in the Montana snow. The din in his classroom was down to the high pitched roar a handful of first graders emanate, and he didn't have to get the wrestling mats out in the gym for another 25 minutes. None of his 40 self-built classroom computers were in need of technical assistance. It was about as peaceful as Mike's day ever gets.

Mike Coon is the kind of teacher school boards, parents and teachers all hope to find. His energy and enthusiasm for science and technology are matched only by his enthusiasm for bringing those subjects to kids. And his K-8 school, the Ophir School in Big Sky, Montana, is the kind of school every teacher dreams of. With just 104 students and a reasonably healthy budget (thanks to the school's location in a resort community), Ophir School is the hub of activities for families with children. The nearest big town is Bozeman, which is 45 miles away.

Mike says his classroom is definitely "teched out." As the new school building was being designed and built, he was able to oversee the networking and electrical components of his classroom. The school board's commitment to science and technology meant that he had to seek grant funds simply to fill in the gaps. And because Mike built the classroom computers himself, Ophir School students now have the luxury of 60 computers!

An important part of Mike's sixth grade curriculum is a weather unit. With a computer for every student in the room, Mike realized that he could use the internet to spark and draw from his sixth grader's own curiosity about weather. With his students, Mike found that there were two local web sites reporting weather conditions. One weather station, which belonged to the Big Sky Ski Resort, was located on top of a nearby mountain. The other was at the Gallatin National Airport in Bozeman. Half of Mike's students began collecting the daily high and low temperatures reported by the station on the mountain, while half collected the same data from the airport station. Needless to say, the students noticed a difference. Even though the two stations were just 45 miles apart, the data was quite different. Students also noticed that their own local weather sometimes seemed more like Bozeman's than that of the closer resort; sometimes it was the other way around.

"One day a student went in to Bozeman for an appointment, and came back to report that the temperature at the airport was 60°, while the temperature here at school was 30°!" remembers Mike. It must have been a glorious moment for Mike when the students said, "Hey, if we want accurate data, we need a weather station right here!"

And they didn't have to beg; not with Mike as a teacher. "At first, I thought it would be nice to have the kids build our own station and I looked at some kits," he remembers. "But they were all kind of 'rag-tag' and didn't look like they would last more than a year or two."

Then he came across the Davis web site, and was very happily surprised at the price of the Vantage Pro. He realized that using grant money to purchase a Davis weather station would be a very good use of the funds. He also realized that the level of technology and quality Davis offered was just what his rather technologically savvy students needed.

"I asked the class what they thought, and they went nuts!" Mike said.

Since the kids helped set up the Vantage Pro, the Weather Project "has just exploded." The project has been the focus of stories in the local press, and the students have been able to offer weather services to the community as part of Ophir School's "service learning" program.

"We started out by using my students' original observation that the weather was different here than in Bozeman. Half the class continued to track the airport data, while half tracked our own data from the Vantage Pro. Of course they saw a big difference."

Back in September, 2001, the students began graphing temperatures by hand on graph paper. That exercise allowed them to see trends - and it also made them more than eager to learn how to graph using the computer and Excel. Now they are all Excel fluent. They even use formulas to create averages and daily highs and lows, and are beginning to predict daily highs and lows based on their own historical data.

"At Ophir School, we believe in an integrated approach to teaching. We bring science, language, math, social studies into every subject. The Weather Project has been such an easy fit to that approach," he told us. "And it is universally popular. Both girls and boys are interested in it - I find that the girls especially are into the organization and collection aspects."

All the students are involved in presentations to the school board and to the community. They help maintain the web site and create Power Point presentations about the Weather Project. The Big Sky Institute at Montana State University is now working with the kids on probability and on a GPS system. And Mike has plans to take his students to the University to offer a presentation, complete with PowerPoint slides and carefully collected data, to the university students.

As the din in his classroom began to escalate, and the wrestling mats began to call his name, Mike told us a parting story about a geologist who had visited his classroom earlier in the day. "He was just amazed at the amount of technology, and he told me that five years ago he would have considered himself very lucky to have a lab as well equipped."

Mike's sixth graders are indeed lucky. They've got a teacher who understands that technology will open the doorways through which their curiosity will lead them. And on the other side of those doorways will emerge young adults who will delight in a scientific mystery, heed their own observations, challenge assumptions, communicate their knowledge, and understand that the worlds of science, nature, culture, and arts are interconnected.

Don't miss the Ophir School web site. The site itself is a testament to Mike Coon's ability to help his students integrate visual and linguistic communications with technology! Teachers will especially enjoy Mike's Lesson Plan and Jenny's Excel graph. It is at: http://home.mcn.net/~ophir/. (You'll also find their weather page on our Weather World 'Round page.)

Weather Wise Quiz Question 5: Mrs. Park's fourth grade class at Canyon Crest Elementary School in Provo, UT sent this question to Jack Williams, author of the USA Today Weather Book. "What is the highest temperature in the world has been and where was it?" Their guess was 136 ºF. Were they right?

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Teachers, NWA May Grant You $500 for Your Weather Unit
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The National Weather Association is offering $500 grants to teachers in grades K-12. The grants are to improve meteorology education. (We at Davis would like to point out that the amount is perfect for installing a Vantage Pro at your school-and we can't think of a more appropriate use for the funds!) The deadline is August 1, 2002. Find everything you need to know about this grant at http://www.wxdude.com/grant.html.

Are you already using a Davis weather product in your classroom? We'd love to hear from you. Tell us about your curriculum and lesson plans, any resources you have found, and your success stories. We'll share them with other teachers on our website.

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You're Brilliant! Answers to Quiz Questions
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Question 1: True, the air is less dense on a humid day. But the effect on the distance a baseball will travel is negligible, amounting to only a few inches more. But on a humid day, the ball itself is heavier and less elastic than a "dry" ball. This is where the real effect of humidity becomes clear: a 400 foot line drive on an average humidity day will go another 15 feet on a low-humidity day. This is why some professional baseball teams have taken to storing game balls in humidity-controlled lockers until it's time to pitch them.

Question 2: Between 1959 and 1995, 357 people died as a result of lightning strikes in Florida. Second place goes to Texas with 169, followed by North Carolina with 168. Considering that North Carolina is about 1/5 the size of Texas with about 13 million fewer residents, we give North Carolina the honorary second place ribbon. If you're having a recurring lightning dream that you think may be a premonition, move to Alaska. No one has died from a lightning strike there during those 36 years. (Source: The Weather Book, by Jack Williams)

Question 3: Vexillology seeks to understand and explain the important part played by flags in the modern world. For an extra three points, repeat six times: "Vexillologists Vexed by Flag's Flagellations."

Question 4: Do you hate your house? Is it insured and you're nowhere near it? Then you might go with the little guy. Some of the smallest funnels are the most destructive, and large tornadoes are often weak. In the world of tornadoes, size is not always indicative of strength.

Question 5: Jack told them that that their very good guess of 136ºF was exactly right. It was in Aziza, Libya on September 13, 1922. Jack tackles more such questions on his website at http://www.usatoday.com/weather/askjack/waskfun.htm.

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Who You Gonna Call?
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Each month after the E-News goes out, we receive messages back. Sometimes the messages are in response to a story we shared; other times they are a request for help of some kind. We read all the emails, answer those we can, and pass the rest on to the appropriate departments.

We think you should know, though, that if you're interested in the fastest possible reply, news@davisnet.com may not be the best place to send your message. Questions about how things work should be addressed to tech support directly at support@davisnet.com. For general information about the products, such as how much cable comes with a station contact sales@davisnet.com. To request a catalog to be sent to you by mail, click here.

Please continue to send your comments, weather URLs, and story suggestions to news@davisnet.com. We look forward to getting your comments and any responses you have to the E-newsletter. Member participation is what keeps the E-newsletter alive and kicking.

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Well, that’s it for this month. You'll be hearing from us again next month!
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