Tracking
a Hurricane for Practice
1. Track the forward speed and direction of Hurricane Andrew.
Print the Hurricane
Tracking Sheet. (Alternatively, Macintosh users may elect to
track Hurricane Andrew using the McHurricane
software. Having trouble downloading McHurricane, then go to our
software help page. Windows
3.1 and Windows 95 users may elect to track Andrew using Tracking
The Eye.)
Download the
twelve
satellite (GOES 7) images of Hurricane Andrew . The images were
taken six hours apart. Image number 1 is from midnight EDT, Saturday,
August 22; image number 12 is from 6:00 PM EDT, Tuesday, August
25. Plot information from the images onto the Hurricane Tracking
Sheet or the McHurricane software or on the Tracking The Eye software.
2. How far (in
pixels) did Andrew move from image 04 to image 07?
3. How much distance
does each pixel of this image represent?
4. What is the
actual distance the hurricane traveled on earth's surface? (Consider
the number of pixels times the representative distance of each pixel.)
5. Now that you
know how many kilometers Andrew has traveled, you need to figure
out the number of hours it took to go that far. You can then calculate
Andrew's average forward speed in kilometers per hour.
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