Hurricane Chasing And Weather Observing On Bicycles

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Two videos made during Hurricane Sandy show how you can get great hurricane

chase footage on a bicycle. The bicycle also takes on an interesting role in observing

local temperature variations in a recent AMS paper.

 

 

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00044.1

 

 

Weather Bike: A Bicycle Based Weather Station for Observing Local Temperature Variations

John J. Cassano

Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO

SUMMARY. This short note has shown how a simple and inexpensive bicycle mounted portable weather station, dubbed the Weather Bike, can be used to make observations of local temperature variability. The magnitude of temperature changes observed near Boulder, Colorado during January 2013 were surprising to the author, especially given the very short spatial scales over which this variability was observed. These types of data could be used to excite students about microclimate and instrumentation issues being discussed in their classes and teams of students could be given Kestrel weather stations so they could make their own observations to test hypotheses related to concepts discussed in their classes. It is likely that the primary educational benefit of the Weather Bike would be by providing a link between the students' own, non-quantified, experiences with local temperature variability and direct measurements of this feature of local climate. Hopefully this would help increase student excitement about topics related to local weather and climate and future rigorous pedagogical studies could document the impact of this tool on students' learning.