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Hurricanes and tornadoes
The year 2005 had the most extreme hurricane season on record, with Katrina
devatating New Orleans, and Hurrican Center running out of names, the first hurricane
in history hitting Spain and Portugal, and hurricane
Epsilon still active past the official end of the hurricane season. Naturally there
were some questions about hurricanes.
To explain things, I made a tornado machine to show that rising air, combined
with some rotation, will self-organize into a vortex, which on a small of course
scale looks more like a tornado than a hurricane. The tornado in the box is 4 feet tall.
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Here's a movie of the tornado box in action
- how to build one for $20
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The second thing to explain is why hurricanes rotate in the first place, and why
they go counterclockwise in the Northern Hemispere and clockwise in the Southern
hemispere. For this purpose I made a flat rotating earth (hey, if Intelligent
Design can be
called 'science', I can claim that the earth is flat), so that I could show
that a rolling ball on a rotating disk does not follow a straight ground path,
but curves to the right in the Northern hemisphere.
Here's how to make this turntable.
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How does the VLA work?
The Very Large Array is located not too far from here (on Google Earth go to
34°04'32.85"N 107°36'35.83"W), so I was asked about it. Besides explaining
simple parabolic mirrors, I wanted to make 2 points: 1) why are they so big, and
2) why do you chain them together?
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I made a parabolic shape out of a piece of aluminum flashing (30x12 cm or so), and
some cardboard. You can see a cork in the focal point. Off to the right out of
the picture is a lamp
(same one I used for the soap bubbles). You can see
the light rays converging and lighting up the cork. In addition, I had a laser
pointer, you can also see the reflected laser light.
All the light that fall on the mirror gets collected in the focal point, and that
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Where do all the animals come from?
Time to talk about evolution, and the big picture of the history of planet earth.
I have this poster (more here)
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Any suggestions, comments, greetings are greatly
appreciated.
Just click here and
type away!
Last update December 2005 - HvH
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Ask Mr. Science
Hurricanes and tornadoes
