Weather’s Formation From the Collision of Heat and Cold

If a person were to think of something that is heavily influential in our day-to-day lives, only a select few would use one of the major starting points of conversation, the weather. It is important in determining the clothes we wear during the day, a small effect the weather can cause, and it sometimes can be important in determining if an entire city or area shuts down in preparation for severe weather conditions. However, weather is caused by the same factors, even though it can vary drastically. The main influence for severe weather is the clash between warm and cold air. Warm air, which usually elevates over a surface with its lower density, causes cold air to push under it, causing a collision between the two different kinetic energies. This collision causes a system of warm air rising and cold air falling to develop, which are otherwise known as updrafts and downdrafts. From this system, several weather phenomena can happen. The two phenomena being focused on in this project are those related to wind and rotation, tornadoes and hurricanes. Tornadoes are much smaller in scale, forming when air moves in different directions depending on the elevation in the atmosphere. This causes wind shear, which creates a spiraling effect in between the air that starts horizontal, but later becomes vertical and forms a vertical column of rotating air. Hurricanes, on the other hand, form mainly from warm, moist air. While cool air from the ocean is used to help develop thunderstorms along with the moist air, and sometimes cool, dry air can also aid in development, warm and moist air allows the hurricane to persist and continue over long periods of time, much longer than tornadoes. These clusters of thunderstorms are only able to rotate due to the rotation of the Earth. Overall, these weather conditions are some of the most impactful, and they are often intertwined with all other weather phenomena.

In my investigation for the Environmental Science and Engineering Club, I have planned to represent this conflict between cold and moist air by using water mixed with salt and some dirt, which would resemble the impurity of the air in which formations such as tornadoes and hurricanes occur from. Then, while I initially planned on using a heater to rotate the water in a large container, I have now moved the water into two water bottles connected through a 3-D printed bottle connector. This allowed for the spin resembling a rotating water phenomenon to occur more quickly, and showcase the difference between rotation under warm air conditions and cold air conditions. After placing the water mixture within the water bottles, I sealed the water bottles together and flipped them, causing the water to fall to the bottom from the top. Since I had recorded the diameter of the water bottle, I could then measure how quickly it takes for the water in the bottle to make one spiral around the diameter to move to the now lower water bottle. From this, I can use the rotational velocity formula to determine how long the spiraling takes, and then use thermodynamic equations to determine the amount of energy and heat that is needed to cause the speed of the rotation. I did this again once I heated up the water by mixing it with a water solution that has a higher concentration of dirt and salt and has been exposed to hotter conditions. With all of these steps that I have done so far or plan to do, some problems I have encountered so far include the size of the water bottles being used, meaning that I had to switch to soda bottles to prevent leaking caused by the bottle connector being too large, and also the bottle connector itself, which I also broke midway through the procedure. However, what I plan to do with my project is to eventually compare the energy that was developed in the bottle with the energy actually used to form tornadoes, also known as the CAPE. This will help me connect my process to a real-life phenomenon, which is the goal of this project. Hopefully, from this, people can extrapolate ideas on how tornadoes and hurricanes exactly form and, with me eventually finding ways to further reduce the amount of energy in these water bottles, possibly discover ways to prevent tornado and hurricane formation from being as favorable in the future.