Week+Seven

= Week Seven Assignments = Chapter Five: Atmospheric Pressure and Wind

Your assignment for this week is to read chapter five and review the Prezi Chapter Five Page You will have a quiz on Blackboard for this chapter and you have a posting assignment which is located here: http://schmidtphysicalgeography.wikispaces.com/Week+Seven at the bottom of this page.

There is a lot of supplemental material on the chapter five page. Mostly it is related to El Nino, but there is also another Prezi towards the bottom of the page on the Santa Ana Winds. You would be surprised to see how much we are locally connected to this chapter. I linked the aerosol video on this page again (it was first in chapter three) so that once you know where the wind belts are, you will understand it differently.

Draw the Global Wind Belts

The link above will take you to a page where you can see how to draw the global wind belts step by step. You do not have to do this, but I always have my onsite students do this, and I do believe that there is something to be said for the tactile element to drawing the wind belts. This chapter is very important for understanding future chapters. Once you learn the wind belts, it helps everything else to fall into place.

Earth Winds Map: [|http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-158.97,36.04,828]

This is a web site that I like to pull up in class so that you can see what the winds actually look like right now. This February has been unusually dry and warm, especially for the super El Nino that we are supposed to be having. Everything is about to change though, and if you take a look at the wind map, you will see there is a lot of activity in the Pacific! And it’s headed our way… In a normal year, you would see the winds look very much like the way we learn them in this chapter. Everything is weird right now because of the El Nino. This web site is also a good example of remote sensing – from chapter two – because it uses data from our satellites to make the map you see. You can zoom in and out and you can drag the map all around the world too. I love to play with this wind map, hope you enjoy it too. It may take a minute to load because it is working with a lot of data, but if I am patient with it, I can even look at it on my tablet.

You may also enjoy this: [] which is El Nino and La Nino years of the past in a list, but under the list in a nice graphic! The graphic shows what we call the Nino index, so you can see how the temperature changes in previous years back and forth between El Nino and La Nina. We were off the chart for this year in case you were wondering; the graphic was created before the El Nino hit is strongest point.

I have a short article on the page about March of 1991 – which was a pretty strong El Nino year. I lived in Lake Tahoe at the time and California was experiencing its worst drought ever at the time. The drought had lasted five years, but when March of 1991 rolled in, it rained or snowed EVERY DAY that March and brought us out of a five year drought in one month. If you have heard people saying we need another Miracle March, that’s what they are talking about. I hope we get one. El Nino is fascinating to me. We don’t understand it yet, don’t know what turns it on or off, and only started studying it after the very strong El Nino of 1982/83. I remember that one too and had some strange experiences as a child in that one – one of which was going to the beach on the day that all of the red crabs beached themselves – which happened again this summer! I put in an article about that too. El Nino makes everything weird and as the water warms up, all kinds of strange things happen like odd birds, fish, whales, sharks, sea snakes, etc. showing up here, so I have a few articles about that too.

This is one of my favorite chapters to teach in class. I hope that you enjoy it too and that it helps you have a better understanding of how things work right here at home with the winds. I know that this chapter is somewhat complex, so this is your only assignment for the week. If you need any help, have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

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