Brieanna Bookter
Blog Post 2
February 9, 2015
Part A:
a)
Wind Speed
of Hurricane Irene
b)
Hurricane Irene first made her debut as a
tropical storm that hit Puerto Rico on August 22, 2011. Shortly after the storm
hit land, Irene strengthened and was categorized as a hurricane. By August 24th,
Irene reached Category 3 strength. Once hitting US land on August 27th,
the hurricane weakened to Category 1 strength and remained at the level as it
traveled up the east coast. The average maximum wind speed recorded on August
27th was 21.53 m/sec. While traveling up the United States’ east
coast, did the storm slow up or slow down?
c)
Recorded Maximum Wind Speeds
Time of Day
|
Maximum Wind Speed (m/sec)
|
18:06
|
10
|
19:00
|
14.3
|
02:36
|
25
|
08:06
|
17.8
|
09:42
|
25.5
|
20:42
|
26.3
|
21:11
|
31.9
|
16:00
|
26.2
|
16:42
|
20.1
|
22:30
|
19.2
|
22:06
|
21.1
|
E) The math is worked out on the attachment with the graph. Once you determine the slopes, you see that all of the values are the same. Each calculation is getting smaller and smaller but resulted in a value that rounded to .047.
G) The slope of the line is -2.43. Mathmetically, this value
means that the graph begins to fall at this point. In terms of the experiment,
this mathematical value proves that the storm is slowing down at this time of
day because it is a negative number.
H) Through the math in part e, we narrowed in on a point
that we could draw the tangent line as exact as possible. It was important to
narrow in the results because we wanted to find out the value at 21:06 to
determine whether or not the storm was slowing down. For this particular value,
the slope was negative, which was a sure way to know the storm was slowing
down.
Such an interesting way to apply calculus to real world problems. The only suggestion I have is to clarify your IRC units. :)
ReplyDeleteYou did a great job presenting the information, it is actually kind of scary to think that hurricanes move this fast.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Amy, that was really the only thing that stood out. Other than that it looks great, really interesting example and really clear.
ReplyDeletebrieanna,
ReplyDeletei like that your topic is relevant and current. we are all interested in information surrounding hurricanes! your table looks good and your intro was great. however, it was a little bit hard to read the information in your image with the calculations, and in your intro, there was no indication as to what point in time you were planning to investigate, which made it a little hard to interpret your results. since it seems as though you wanted to investigate the acceleration of a hurricane, a good question would have been "what is the acceleration of hurricane irene at 21:06 am/pm?" (because also your table does not include what part of the day you are investigating)
the secant calculations that you did are correct for zooming in really close to the point in time you are looking at. however, the time 21:06 was not anywhere in your table. for future reference, just make sure that everything matches. that your question is clear and it matches the rest of your experiment. let me know if you have any questions about the comments that i have made.
professor little