One of the favorite activities we started this year was the tracking of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean every year.
Tracking Hurricanes with NOAA
The NOAA website sends daily emails (from cyclone and hurricane development and travel) so we can plot the locations onto our own charts.
The charts are downloadable from NOAA.
It has been a fascinating study. The kids learned a lot about hurricanes, how to plot points onto a grid, and they even improved their geography.
We even learned more about weather patterns.
For example here are the hurricanes of the Atlantic from 2003. We were kept quite busy.
Although we usually plotted each one separately on its own map, seeing an entire season’s worth is interesting.
In San Antonio, Texas we keep our eyes to the Gulf Coast, which is at risk for destructive hurricanes.
We especially kept our eyes on Claudette and Grace.
From looking at the archives at Weather Underground, San Antonio received a tad of rain from Claudette, but completely missed Grace. Some years we get a ton of rain.
Never know with hurricanes which tend to turn at the last minute.
Each of the kids had a notebook where they kept their collection of hurricane tracking maps.
Unfortunately, that was before digital camera existed, so no photo had ever been taken. But it was definitely a cool project.
Hurricane Experiment in the Sink
The header photo is of a hurricane science experiment that my son did in 2007, I think when Hurricane Olga came very late in the season.
While catching up this blog post in 2023, I forwarded the photos to my son, asking if he remembered the details regarding the experiment. His reply:
Oh, yes!
In a hurricane there is lower pressure, and this experiment was a demonstration of how that creates a difference in water level and therefore storm surge.
I created a low pressure condition in the tube by sucking air through the tube, and then we pulled the tube out of the water to watch the waves as the “storm surge” fell to the level of the rest of the water.
