Rain, Rain, Go Away

Has anyone else in the UK noticed that there's been a lot of rain around us lately?  In my typical fly-off-the-seat-of-my-pants approach to learning what catches our interest at any given moment, I thought it would be most relevant to learn more about rain.

For example, why does it rain?

We also learned that rainfall can be measured using the high-tech way via radar, or the low-tech way of a rain gauge:

Since the low-tech rain gauge looked simple enough to do, we decided to make one ourselves following the instructions here:

This is our version, which according to the explanation here, may not be yield the most accurate measurement since the top and bottom widths of our rain gauge are not exactly the same.  Nonetheless, it serves as a rough and ready version to give us a sense of how much rainfall there has been.

Since it has been so wet, we thought it would be interesting to learn how to measure the humidity in the air at any given moment:

Compared to the natural, pinecone hygrometer we made a few years ago, the bottle hygrometer we've made this time offers us a more accurate reading of the relative humidity in the air.

By putting the readings that we got off of the wet bulb (3 degrees Celcius) and dry bulb (11 degree Celcius) into the computation website found here, we can see immediately that the relative humidity of that day was 17%.  We think that is pretty cool.


This post is linked up to:

1. Nature Study Monday: January 2014 NSM! Link Up
2. Geography and History linkie #1
3. Entertaining and Educational - Atoms
4. Collage Friday - No Spend Month, Marriage, Menus, & Miscellany
5. Weekly Wrap Up: The One Where Dad Was Home
6. The Homeschool Mother's Journal {January 11, 2014}
7. Science Sunday: The Difference Between a Science Demonstration and a Science Experiment
8. Hip Homeschool Hop - 1/14/14