Measuring air pressure

It was a cloudy day at Brownsville Middle School...

This week we learned how to measure different aspects of weather such as temperature (with a thermometer), wind speed (with an anemometer), rain fall (with a rain gauge) and air pressure (with a barometer).

For our lab we built our own barometers to understand how air pressure works. The great thing about this lab was how we used materials anyone can buy from Publix!


The students did SUCH a great job building their barometers and simulating higher air pressure!

Melting cryosphere computer lab

This week we learned about the different spheres of the Earth, namely the biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere and cryosphere. Remember- the cryosphere is an easy name to remember for ice because when Ms Henderson drops her ICE cream she CRIES!

We then did a special lab using real data from Dr. Walt Meier, a sea ice scientist from Boulder, Colorado who works for the National Snow and Ice Data Center. He gave us his sea ice extent (or area) measurements from 1978 to 2005 in Hudson Bay, in the Arctic region. He also gave us the temperature data to match those years. Our class made graphs using Microsoft Excel and pasted them into a Word document along with their conclusion and discussions:

Here is the result!





Our class concluded:

"In the North Pole, the ice expands and retracts. Through the years, temperature increased, which caused the ice to melt. This is important because the sea level will rise and our ecosystem will be affected. The temperature is rising because of CFCs (and other greenhouse gases), causing the greenhouse effect."



Here is an animation of the sea ice every November from 1978-2005:




We also watched animations of the sea ice expanding and retreating through seasons: