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| Can People Predict the Weather? |
by Natalie Baker and Allison O'Connell
Emerson Jrunior High, Enid, Oklahoma
(presented at the 1997 EarthStorm Science Fair)
We started this project in the
sixth grade while we were in Mrs. Lori Painter's classroom. We used the Breckinridge
Mesonet data and the weather strip from "The
Enid News and Eagle" to determine how accurate the weather predictions
in "The Farmers' Almanac" were for the year. We took the project
to the EarthStorm Science Fair in Norman and took first place in our division.
In
seventh grade, we expanded the project and organized the data in a better way.
We compared the actual temperature and rainfall against the predictions from "The
Farmers' Almanac" and graphed the results.
We received a
Superior rating at our local fair and qualified to take our project to the
Regional Science Fair in Alva. At each science fair, we explained to the judges
what we had done and what we had learned from our project. We felt like we
knew our project inside and out after telling so many people about it. This
year, our eighth grade year, we compared temperatures at the Mesonet sites
of Breckenridge and Waurika to the weather predictions in "The Farmers'
Almanac" for the months of March through December of 1996. We also used
the weather strip from "The Enid News and Eagle" to tell if it was
sunny or cloudy. There were a lot of data to compare.
So far, our project has
gone to the local Science Fair where we received a Superior rating, and has
qualified to go to Regional. At the EarthStorm Science Fair, we won first place
in our division and first place overall. What a thrill because unlike our local
science fair, the EarthStorm Science Fair is judged by weather professionals.
This makes this award the most prestigious to us.
This
project has been a lot of fun to do together. We both had specific jobs to
do, but when it came to actually making our board and doing the graphs, we
worked side-by-side. It took so many hours to put all of our data into our
two notebooks and to tally up our results so we could make the graphs. But
it was worth it!
Our conclusion was that people cannot predict the weather a
year in advance for a precise day. But "The Farmers' Almanac" may
be a good indication of weather trends for a week or a month. That may be a
good topic for next year because the weather is so interesting and it affects
not just us but everyone everyday!!! |
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