Humidity, Clouds, Sound Speed Data

Monday the class watched Planet Earth disc two climate change.


Tuesday I started by going over the test from Friday and then covering relative humidity.


Tuesday afternoon I began with coverage of clouds in the classroom. Then I took advantage of an empty A204 to show a cloud slideshow in Google Plus. The complication was that the bandwidth is simply not available to show a Google Plus slide show in the lab. By midday the campus network is simply too saturated to support an on line slide show.


I mentioned only in passing the Bergeron process. That afternoon around five a large cell would develop on the west side of the island. A fisherman from Tamoroleng in Kitti would be killed in a lightning strike on his boat - an exceptionally unusual event here. Despite Pohnpei being in the tropics, the island rarely has thunderstorms.


Wednesday I rode a RipStik on paper, choosing to echo the wave on the board rather than work in the field.

The centerline of my RipStik run was not straight. I did an uphill run on the sidewalk between B and the south faculty building. While this accentuates the amplitude and reduces the wavelength, the need to pump the board may work against a straight centerline.

In the afternoon rain impinged on gathering sound speed data. When I wandered off to the west to try to find a dry echo launch location, the class did not follow. I circled back to the north and wound up atop a pile of clay on the north side of the road. I had a good echo off of the B building in light rain. Some of the students, camped out on the porch of the A building, could see me in the light rain banging the boards. No one came down to investigate nor assist - a first in the history of the course. Every other term the class drifts down and joins me. Maybe the group behavior - sitting on the porch - discouraged any one individual from getting up and coming down to where I was.

I continued on to the administration building, taking measurements in light rain. I did the clapping, timing, and distance measuring, writing results on a scrap of paper. I had never tried doing the lab solo. I found that upping the clap count to 50 helped reduce the error introduced by my having to start and stop my own timer. I obtained no images of the lab.

At the last two locations two students joined me and assisted in gathering data. Mark them as two intrepid students. The exercise with Binky and cloud identification exercises had the intent of conveying that they should plow ahead with work even in the face of rain or challenging terrain. The class has also apparently not absorbed that the class and the classroom are not the same thing. The class happens wherever we happen to be, whether in or out of the classroom. Or in this case, where I was. I suspect the students remained camped out on the porch imagining that I must return to the classroom eventually. But with Binky, being present meant being where Binky was. The class is not always the classroom.


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