Weather Science

 - by KitchenPantryScientist

It’s fun to track the weather, and you can create some cool meteorology instruments using stuff you have around the house. Here’s a great post by NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) on how to make your own weather station.

It’s also fun and easy to do this cool convection current experiment, using warm and cold water to explore how air moves in Earth’s atmosphere.

Convection Experiment (kitchenpantryscientist.com)

To see how cold fronts move under warm fronts, you’ll need ice cube trays, water, blue and red food coloring and a clear container.

  1. Add water to an ice cube tray and add a few drops of blue food coloring to the water in each cube space. Freeze.
  2. Fill a clear container with room temperature water.
  3. Place one or two blue ice cube or two at one end of the container, and a few drops of red food coloring at the other end.
  4. Observe what happens.

The Science Behind the Fun:

Cold water(blue) is more dense than warm water and forces warmer water (red) to move up and over it.

This is similar to the way warm air is forced up when it collides with masses of cold air in the atmosphere. Warm air carries energy, and when there’s lots of moisture in the air, these collisions often result in thunderstorms.

 

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