Final Report: December, 2002

The weather club, Storm Chasers, at Hackettstown Middle School conducted The Sun Times Temperature Project.  There are 5^th through 8^th graders in the club. Our school is located in Warren County, New Jersey.  Each day some students went outside at the same location to take the temperature in degrees Celsius. We used the Real Time Data website to find the sun rise and sun set times in order to calculate the number of minutes of sunlight each day. After using the data from The Global Sun Temperature Project that was collected from various schools, our club plotted the temperature, degrees latitude, and number of minutes of sunlight on two graphs. 

Using the data and our graphs the members of our club observed that some areas of the earth received more sunlight than others based on the tilt of the earth on its axis. Because of the tilt of the Earth during the month of November the Southern Hemisphere receives more sunlight than the Northern Hemisphere. We thought that the more sunlight an area of earth receives the higher the temperature will be in that area. We also thought that areas near the equator will receive more sunlight and will have higher temperatures because this part of the earth bulges out and is closer to the sun. Our graphs agree with our ideas.

We learned that each day the amount of minutes of sunlight decreased by two minutes each day. We predicted that when the tilt of the earth changes as winter turns into spring the amount of sunlight will increase each day. 

E-mail: kkulesa@hackettstown.org