Gardens are much more common in rural areas than they are in urban areas, in part because urban areas are too hot, WVTF, public radio for Roanoke, Va., reports.
“Cities are inherently warmer than their surrounding rural areas,” the station quoted Tammy Parece, a Virginia Tech doctoral student whose dissertation is seeking to find ways to feed hungry people in low-income housing, as saying. “It’s called the urban heat island effect. But not only are they warmer, within a city the temperature varies according to the built environment.”
Using the Weather Underground site, Ms Parece and a few colleagues at Virginia Tech have been able to furnish about a dozen schools around Roanoke with equipment that provides rapid-fire readings of weather variables, including temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and precipitation amounts.
Students at the schools learn about weather, and many may actually benefit from community gardens installed if the conditions are found to be favorable. But in addition to stabbing at a solution strategy for feeding kids at schools where more than 90 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals, kids make line graphs and other charts of the weather data they get from the stations and share with the world via Weather Underground.
“Weather is no longer just reading a temperature or using an instrument to look at one moment in time,” the station quoted Wade Whitehead, one math and science teacher, as saying. “It’s about identifying patterns, looking at history and trends, and then actually making predictions about what’s going to happen next.
“Science takes time,” he continued. “Real science is about looking at what is or isn’t happening and then making a strong educated guess about what might happen next.”
Live updates from weather stations around the world are displayed on Weather Underground at the bottom for several locations. The site for Roanoke shows several middle and elementary school weather stations feeding into the network of weather data.
Schools interested in becoming observing sites for the Weather Underground network, an activity that can increase interest in science as students incorporate their immediate world into their studies, can find copious resources on wunderground.com. Some cost less than $1000 and provide real-time updates and historical data. Most work with a variety of software.
Ms Parece is expected to complete her dissertation in two years and then hopes to adapt the process for use in creating community gardens in other urban areas.
