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| Your Neighborhood's Weather over the Past 30 Years |
This project will be in two parts:
EXPERIMENTAL
You should look at the stumps of three recently cut trees, ones which show their rings plainly. They should be ones within a mile or so of each other so that they depict much the same growing environment. It might help to dump some water on the open cut so as to make the rings show most distinctly. It would also be wise of you to photograph these for your records as well as for your report.
How old were the trees? Can you count all the rings all the way into their centers? Write down your findings in your notebook.
Which ring represents this year's growth? Which ring represents last year's growth?
In observing which years were ones with good growth, and ones with poor growth conditions, write down which years (by numbers 2001 or 1996, or whatever) were good ones and which were poor ones.
What do you think makes a good year 'good'? And what makes a bad year likely to have been 'bad'? Think about average temperatures and rainfall.
CORROBORATION
This might be the easy part or the hard part of this project. Let's suppose that somewhere in the Weather Channel's website you can find annual records and how they stacked up to long term averages. But remember, you need records of the same area in which you observed the trees. Another place to look would be the records of the National Oceanic and Atmospherics Agency (NOAA), and a third place would be to pester your local county agricultural agent, whom you will find listed in your phonebook.
YOUR REPORT
You will need to average your observations of the three trees into some sort of composite sketch. Perhaps you might color in rings with red that your corroborating source said were poor years, and green those rings that were good. If your observations were correct, you should see a number of narrow red rings and a many wide green ones.
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