NSSL | Education | Ideas

Ideas for Teaching

• Stereo photography
• Why radar can't (usually) see tornadoes
• Graphing information
• Vectors for wind speed
• Calculating %
• Simple math
• Not so simple math
• Wildflowers & rainfall

Wildflowers and Rainfall

Introduction

I have spent a fair amount of time studying the wildflowers in central Oklahoma in part because most of them are new to me. I did not grow up here. There is a particular meadow I frequent on hikes where I have spent time studying and noting the flowers. The meadow appears not to have been disturbed for some time.

One of the first flowers I saw and photographed was liatris. I did not see it again until two years ago. There had been several rainy days in June that year whereas in other recent years June was relatively dry. The following year had some rain in June, but then dry weather. Liatris plants came up, started to bloom, but then died early. I plan to graph wildflower blooms vs. rainfall.

Graphing the Data

Just how to graph or visualize the data is an interesting challenge. I could certainly plot rainfall vs. day of the year in a histogram type of graph, but how would I note the wildflowers? By dots, perhaps, on the dates of of first bloom noted. There are so many flowers it could get noisy. Perhaps I could shade in colored, horizontal bars along the date range of the blooms and color code various flowers with a key on the vertical axis. But that won't allow me to see year-to-year variation easily unless I can fit more than one graph vertically on the same page.

Rainfall data can be obtained from your local National Weather Service office. Of course, it won't necessarily be exactly the same as the rainfall in the meadow(s) you study, but it is archived for you and readily available on NWS web sites. Find your local NWS office by clicking on the map at your location. You'll be taken to the local NWS office that includes your area. Then look for words like "Local Climate Data" in the links on the left side of their web site.

Multi-Year Project

I'm curious to see if there are patterns besides the liatris blooms. This project would take multiple years to complete, but may still be feasible in some form for schools. I recall taking a field trip to identify wildflowers in my high school biology class. I believe my teacher mentioned which flowers he'd seen last year that we weren't seeing this year (and vice versa), but I don't remember if he had any kind of notation, table, or visualized record of such observations.

Last updated: March 26, 2002
Created by: DSZ