Tuesday 7 June 2016

What is Wind?

Our Big Science Question:

Can we predict if we need to eat inside or out - is it going to be a wet lunch time?

We have looked at the clouds and can make some weather observations and predictions using the clouds... what about the wind? We know that wind is an important part of the weather, so we have another question...


Does the wind effect wether we can eat outside and get some fresh air?


What is wind?

Wind is air that you can feel (Lucy) because it is blowing (Max) it is air that is moving
“Air that is in motion” and motion is moving (Oliver)
Hot air goes up and cold air goes down (James and Ryder)
There is a land breeze and a sea breeze (Reagan) it is to do with warm air and cold air moving

Can we see the air moving and the warm air rising and cold air sinking?

no... so can we make a model?  

We used blue ice and warm water with some red food colouring.

Prediction: 

Galaxy think the cold air (water) is going to move to the top ….
Ice is cold - it is solid water (Alexander), 
We will see a little bit of purple (Lucy)
The ice will melt and turn into liquid (Reagan)
Blue is cold and water from the hot tap…. Red (hot)

Investigation:

We put the warm water in a big glass container and Kerri added some blue ice, Then Kerri added some red food colouring to the warm water.

Observations:

We could see the cold blue water sinking to the bottom of the container.
The red drops kind of went down a bit first and then the red spread out really fast towards the top.
We could see the blue spreading and moving across the bottom of the container and the red staying on the top.
After a while the water went purple becasue the cold water got warmer and the warm water got a bit colder.

Conclusions:

Cold water sinks and warm water rises. This is like in the movie, where the warm air form the beach rises and the cold air sinks over the sea.
The cold air moves into the space where the warm air was.
Moving air is wind!

Here is a link so we can try this again at home Model of warm air rising...

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