Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Global Wind Belts! -> Horse Latitudes and Jet Streams!

While we were in class learning about global winds, the Coriolis effect, trade winds and all that other fun stuff, two categories stood out to me. The first one that I thought was pretty darn cool was the horse lattitudes. I thought this was interesting because we were told that when the horses ran out of food, the captain of the boat, who paid a whole lot of money for the horse, would toss it off the boat. Throwing the horses off also made the boat lighter in weight. The other category that stuck out to me was jet streams. If you were going from the east to west in a plane and went along the jet stream you could get to your destination faster. But if you went west to east along the jet stream it could take a little longer. I find it kind of crazy that some cold weak winds can affect our lives and the weather [in the U.S.] so much.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Kites =D



In science we went out and flew kites. It was super fun, but our paper kites that we made didn't fly that well. There wasn't much of a breeze to carry them. But on our worksheet we pretended there was a breeze and said it was a local winds causing or kites to "fly". While we were outside we learned about the difference between local and global winds. Our kites flew because of local winds that are caused by land and sea breezes.During the day there is a sea breeze becasue the cool air is coming from the sea. At night there is a land breeze since the hot air from the ocean rises and there is cool air coming from the land.