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Sustainability Education
Keep digging Tony
"Our Atmosphere Investigation Site"
We began work on our atmospheric investigations in February this year (1999).
Our instrument shelter was purchased from GLOBE and we began by painting it with undercoat before two coats of white gloss enamel. This took a couple of weeks.
While we were painting our instrument shelter we learnt to identify the different cloud types and how to send this data to GLOBE via the Internet.
Levelling the post
Setting the post
Once the instrument shelter was painted we had to concrete in a post at our chosen site to erect the shelter and the rain gauge.
We made sure the posts were level and nailed some supports before mixing up the concrete.
Once the concrete was poured, we left the post over the weekend to set.
The next job was to drill holes and bot the shelter to the post and screw on the rain gauge. Once that was done we checked our maximum/minimum thermometer against a calibrated thermometer that had been placed in an ice bath and read zero degrees.
We record our atmospheric data during environmental studies or other classes if we are outside of the solar noon. Calculating solar noon and Universal Time takes a while to get the hang of!!
The rain pH has been measured using the pH pen from our 'Streamwatch Kit' which we also calibrated using standard solutions. We have been surprised at the range of pH which has been mostly acidic but was up to 8.0 on Monday (22/3).
Tony, Peter and Anna with our finished product (Feb 99)
The GLOBE project has been fun so far and we look forward to doing the other investigations.
Bye for now,
Tony Dennis, Sandra Siggee,
Peter Brooke-Kemper,
Anna Zolijan and Jai Ward
(Environmental Studies Class)
