Final Report - June, 2003

We live in Bar Harbor and attend Conners-Emerson school. We are in a gifted/talented group of three. We are in fifth grade.

For this project, we took the temperature (using a thermometer) around 1:00 p.m. every day in the shade for a week, May 12 - 16. We found the average of the numbers we collected, and we put it on to the site.

We found a website listing when the sun was setting and rising that week for our area, and figured out the minutes of sunlight each day by calculating the difference between the sunrise and sunset. We found the average of all those minutes, and also submitted that.

We went on the computer and found the minutes of daylight and temperatures for different places from all over the world, and graphed the data, and used the graphs to compare the minutes of sunlight and the temperature to the latitude. We made scatter graphs which made it easier to understand this. We also interpreted our results by taking a globe and saying our theories.

The earth rotates around the sun and so sometimes the Earth is tilted toward the sun and sometimes the Earth is tilted away from it. Some areas of the Earth receive more sunlight than others because the Earth is tilting to the sun that way in this time of year.

The people around the equator always get 12 hours of day, 12 hours of night. So therefore sometimes the North gets more daylight than the South and vice-versa. That's why the summer in the North and South has 24 hours of daylight and the winter in the North and South is 24 hour darkness. This tilt also explains why, in this project, we at 44.5° N. latitude got 885 minutes of daylight, while the San Martin de tours School in Argentina at 34° S. latitude got only 623 minutes.

Some places of the Earth are hotter than others because the sunlight is hitting the Earth in a more direct angle in someplaces than others (0° angle vs. a slanted angle). In our project, people who live at a N. latitude of 1.7 get warmer days than people with a N. latitude of 44.4, because the sunlight is hitting them at a more direct angle.

Some things we learned:

• Why some places are hotter than others.
• That places are hotter because they get the sun most directly.
• Even if a place gets more sunlight than others, that doesn't mean that it will have warmer temperatures if the sun isn't hitting it directly.

Things we'd do differently:

• More persistently remember to take the temperature every day.
• Try not to get side-tracked.
   

E-mail: swinne@u98.k12.me.us