Module 6 : How are the Earth, atmosphere, and cultures all connected?

Explain:

    In this module I got a lot of new information. I guess this is a topic that I never really thought about -  which when I think about it is surprising, especially since atmosphere is everywhere and linked to everything.

Here in Alaska, weather is everything: It determines what activity you can do outside, how difficult a task is going to be, what equipment will be needed, etc.  My relatives down south simply don't understand that I can be pinned down for days in a cove on outer Chichagof by a low pressure system that comes up out of the gulf, because in their world waiting for the weather simply doesn't happen on that scale. I've always been very attuned to the weather - especially the wind and sea state, but I never wondered where it came from before....

I found the TD post about the jet stream very interesting, because recently my home newspaper, the Sitka Daily Sentinel, published an article that the jet stream is supposed to shift southward this year.
 As a result, Southeast will have a colder, more snowy winter.  This will heavily affect the deer population, which is the source for most of my winter meat - heavy snows drive deer down to the beach, where they slowly starve because the nutritional value of kelp is not enough to sustain them.  The deer taken below was down near the beach very early this year, and weather forecasts like this make me worry about the hunting over the next few years.

Air pollution is another thing that I hadn't thought about that frequently - I certainly understood the idea of  Arctic haze from my time spent in Fairbanks, but I always attributed that to the output from our own cars and the fact that the smog would settle over the Tanana Valley. Because there wasn't enough diurnal change in temperature, the air would settle for sometimes weeks. I didn't know that pollutants from far away would drift to the poles, and that not all of what I was seeing was caused by Alaskans....

Extend:

  How will I use this information in my classroom?  Third grade earth science includes a unit about weather and another about survival, so I will probably use the TD posts on the jet stream and weather. I also find that the NOAA weather website to be very helpful and I teach my kids how to read the marine forecasts in our local area.

Another way I use NOAA is for myself - I'm planning to be gone on a weekend hunting trip, and because the satellite images look like this:

I think it would be prudent to make sub plans for Monday, just in case this thing hits before then and pins me down somwhere...

Another lesson I did which I really liked, was when I taught in Fairbanks we boiled water, stuck electronic temperature probes inside the jars, and placed the containers outside over the course of the afternoon and waited for them to cool. When we melted the ice and graphed the results.  The graph looked like a descending staircase - just the opposite of the graph posted in the Phun physics lab, and it illustrated the energy expended in a state change because the graph was flatter there. If I could find those nifty probes here in Sitka, I would love to teach it again....


Evaluate:
How is this relevant?  Well, as I said before, wind and weather mean everything to an active rural Alaskan. I would say that if my students choose to stay in the state, there is very good reason to learn how to use satellites, images, and forecasts to inform your decisions on where to go and what to bring.  Culturally, the pollution in the atmosphere is affecting the flora and fauna, and those in turn will affect the people that live here.

As I stated in the beginning, I always accepted the weather as a given - it was what it was, and I never asked why. I never thought that I could do anything about it, but when I learned that particulates can land on the snow, causing it to melt faster and reducing snow pack and polar ice caps, I thought that I might be wrong, that humans can have an effect on the weather.

Three C's

I visited Carolyn who was wondering about the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean.

I visited Emerson's explorations who had an interesting fact about gold in salt water.

I visited Kris who got me interested in a mystery class activity that students do collaboratively