Heat Transfer Lab and Weather Model: Let’s Get Breezy!
With the assistance of a few teacher demonstrations (online animation, using a radiometer and rubbing hands), students review the concept of heat transfer through convection, conduction and radiation. Then they apply an understanding of these ideas as they use wireless temperature probes to investigate the heating capacity of different materials—sand and water—under heat lamps (or outside in full sunshine). The experiment models how radiant energy drives convection within the atmosphere and oceans, thus producing winds and weather conditions, while giving students the hands-on opportunity to understand the value of remote-sensing capabilities designed by engineers. Students collect and record temperature data on how fast sand and water heat and cool. Then they create multi-line graphs to display and compare their data, and discuss the need for efficient and reliable engineer-designed tools like wireless sensors in real-world applications.
Air temperature differentials generate daytime sea breezes and nighttime land breezes.Copyright 2010 Corso, Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sea_Land_Breeze.svg
At times, it can be difficult to monitor atmosphere and ocean systems due to limited access, extreme weather or lack of a communication infrastructure. Engineers are revolutionizing the way we monitor the natural environment by creating environmental remote sensors (ERS) for improving weather forecasting. Engineers design sensor networks to extract information from the natural environment via an array of sensors and store that information in a repository on a server. These systems have the potential to provide scientists with new environmental and climate data as well as important hazard alerts. ERSs are most important in remote or dangerous environments that have never been studied before due to their inaccessibility, such as NASA's project in Antarctica and future projects on Mars and Europa. Students approach the problems presented in this activity as engineers, scientists or other researchers would, using wireless sensors to collect environmental data.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Describe how land and sea breezes are formed.
- Write a testable hypothesis about the heating rates of sand and water.
- Use wireless temperature probes to collect data and create line graphs of the measured temperature changes of sand and water.
- Analyze collected data and draw conclusions to accept or reject a hypothesis.