This image of Tropical Storm Chantal depicts wind speed in color and wind direction with small barbs. White barbs point to areas of heavy rain. The highest wind speeds, are shown in purple. The data were obtained by NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite on August 1, 2007, as it was just south of Newfoundland, Canada. NASA image
Here in North Texas, most of our classrooms see refugees from coastal storms from time to time — in fact, most schools still have refugees from Hurricane Katrina, or Hurricane Rita. Plus, sitting close to Tornado Alley, everyone understands that weather is no abstraction here. Weather is personal.
Maps of weather offer teachers a good way to make geography personal, too — or at least more relevant. Those little clouds swirling west from the coast of Africa today could be the hurricane that swamps the Texas coast in a couple of weeks.
An e-mail correspondent sent a link to the Weather Channel’s Hurricane Central, suggesting I might want to track storms for my personal safety (Tropical Storm Chantal is far off in the Atlantic, and racing away; no problems from that storm).
Why not have kids track storms in class? The map above, for example, should be a basic foundation for much of Texas history (the explorers and Spanish colonization, for example), for U.S. history (explorers and the slave trade, the Triangle Trade, the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II, and so on). Get students used to using maps to track important and interesting things, and map use will become second nature, as it should be. The Weather Channel and other sources create updates on that basic map several times a day.
What sorts of storms did the explorers face? The slave ships? How big was the storm that shipwrecked Esteban in Texas? What is one likely source of the massive forest blowdown that created the greater Caddo Lake?
Hurricane season runs through October. There should be a lot of grist for the learning mill just in the daily weather reports. You might also use the weather maps in the daily newspaper (most local newspapers will give you a classroom set for a week for under $20.00 under the Newspapers in Education (NIE) project) (NIE offers an interactive quiz on geography weekly, by the way).
Is there any kid who isn’t fascinated by the weather? That’s your hook. Maps are freely available from the Weather Channel site, and from dozens of others.
- Image from the Weather Channel website, showing the Tropical Atlantic where most hurricanes and tropical storms affecting the U.S. originate; this map for July 31, 2007, shows Tropical Storm Chantal heading northeast toward Newfoundland.
Caption from NASA: The third tropical depression of the Atlantic hurricane season formed around 11:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, July 30 west of Bermuda. Exactly 12 hours later on Tuesday, July 31, at 11:00 a.m. EDT, the storm strengthened into a tropical storm with sustained winds of 40 mph and higher gusts. At that time, the storm was named Tropical Storm Chantal. Chantal was located near latitude 40.2 north and longitude 62.7 west, about 330 miles (530 km) south of Halifax, Nova Scotia and is moving rapidly toward the northeast near 23 mph (37 km/hr). Chantal is not a threat to the United States.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
One further suggestion for students when tracking storms, develop and test your emergency preparedness (“Katrina was no Girl Scout”). Every school should have an emergency or disaster and pandemic plan, as well as every family and community. I have links to examples at Grassroots Science (Alaska). Students, unlike adults, can follow plans literally, which makes them excellent testers– if someone says “leave the room” and everyone uses the same window what happens? if the sign says, follow me, and you end up with your nose against the wall, what should happen? [Remember Groucho and “walk this way”?]
This comes via the Episcopal Emergency network, one of the emergency planning Yahoo groups–
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I was adding a link to my edublogging sources at del.icio.us when I ran across this comment on oral history hurricanes–
User comment John Pucci (August 2nd, 2007, 11:40 pm) Excellent article!! I worked on a Hurricane Katrina data-visualization project last year for my agency in New Orleans. It’s an oral history with compelling, raw video that offers an unedited look at people’s memories of the storm and the fallout. As each video plays, a simple visual device displays recurring themes by keyword; commonalitites between experiences are presented via lists of names headed by recurring topics. Thought your readers might be interested.
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I use posts with images linked to real-time mapping such as Where is… Bethel’s tsunami
and Where is… jet stream
It would be neat if a classroom in North America or elsewhere wanted to set up a blog page with these types of maps so that others could see where the sites are hidden around the Internet and to maybe set up their own localized versions. I find it difficult to locate quality data websites and then to find a “feed” or image which is updated. Anyone from down under?
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I regularly check http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ I find them fascinating. Fingers crossed, by the way, this so far has been a light season.
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