Graphical interpretation

Preparation and Planning

This lesson is supported by imagery of Louisiana pre and post Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the severity of the weather that wreaked damage on the New Orleans coastline. This serves as thought-provoking stimulus material and will quickly help students to understand the applied value of their graphical analysis.

However all elements stand alone and material can be delivered without any supporting IT. Sufficient Student Worksheets should be photocopied for the class. In the absence of a projector or broadband access you may find it useful to review the images yourself, in order to be able to give a detailed account of events and impact.

About the MOD Topic

The Met Office was founded in 1854 to provide information on the weather and marine currents to the marine community. The first international meteorological congress in Vienna followed shortly in 1864 and founded an International Meteorological Organisation to further essential international co-operation. This eventually transformed into the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), a specialised agency of the United Nations.

Rapid developments in meteorology led to the establishment of the first Met Office outstation at Farnborough, giving advice to pilots although at this point statistical evaluation of historical weather data to predict patterns was non-existent (a manual process and therefore too time-consuming). Met Officers were able only to provide short-term forecasts based on immediate readings. It wasn't until 1962 that the Met Office took delivery of its first computer to permit numerical forecast techniques. However, its importance was noted by General Eisenhower, back as far as the end of the Second World War:

1944: The D-Day landings are planned but are postponed due to bad weather. Group Captain Stagg, General Eisenhower's Senior Meteorological Officer (and a Met Office employee) informs General Eisenhower on the evening of 4th June that a 'weather window' is expected on the 6th. President Truman later said: 'The day selected for the continental assault was probably the only day during the month of June on which the operations could have been launched'.

From its first broadcast on the BBC in 1954, great technological steps forward were taken, including the now commonplace use of satellite imagery and advances in computer-based interpretation of data. In 2005 the Met Office gathered together the world's leading climate scientists to discuss vital climate change issues. Many of these steps forward were the product of severe weather conditions or other needs:

1953: A severe depression and storm surge in the North Sea causes catastrophic flooding in south-east England. This leads to planning and eventual construction of the Thames Barrier and the development of the Met Office's Storm Tide Forecasting Service.

1987: A severe storm inflicts major damage to large areas of southern and south-east England. It leads to a review of forecasting methods and the development of the National Severe Weather Warning Service.

1998: Volcanic activity in Iceland releases vast quantities of ash into the atmosphere. The Met Office's dispersion model successfully predicts how it will behave and so averts aircraft disasters.

2002: The Met Office provides guidance and support to senior planners and operational staff for Operation Veritas in Afghanistan. The Mobile Meteorological Unit is deployed to the site.

Today the Met Office plays a key role on the international stage, representing the UK in many global organisations. Its role includes:

- promoting standardisation of meteorological and related observations and ensuring the uniform publication of observations and statistics;
- furthering the application of meteorology to aviation, shipping, agriculture and other human activities;
- encouraging research and training in meteorology and related fields;
- facilitating worldwide co-operation in the establishment and maintenance of observation networks.

Further Opportunities for Learning

The material in this lesson can be used to support revision of both graphical interpretation and multi-stage problem solving skills. Each Student Worksheet contains sufficient 'unused' content for students to design further sets of questions for their peers to answer.

The data can also be used as source material to support the Reasoning and Proof lesson which explores graphs of real-life situations e.g. time series, moving averages, scatter diagrams, stem and leaf tables, cumulative frequency and histograms.

You may wish to invite students to consider inverting graphs (i.e. swapping around the axes) or changing the units (i.e. converting km into m) to see what impact this has on the pattern that emerges. Alternatively invite students to design graphs via ICT tools.

Students may indicate an interest in the weather patterns that give rise to hurricanes. An excellent animated guide to hurricanes can be found online at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4588149.stm. This website also contains a detailed timeline of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

Further information on the UK Met Office can be found at www.metoffice.gov.uk. Students can download daily weather reports and extensive historical weather data (e.g. monthly rainfall (mm) since 1914) at: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/seriesstatistics/ukrain.txt). This can be used to support further studies on the same subject or to support additional graphical work.

Students wishing to understand more about the international remit of the Met Office should visit http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/services/internationalairnavigation.html which details its work, alongside its sister body in Washington, as a World Area Forecasting Centre. This supports international aviation through the provision of global upper-wind and temperature data for all flights throughout the world.

Encourage interested students to read the News Articles which featured up-to-date reports about how the UK Armed Forces have recently supported international countries that are victims to tropical storms. These could be used to create new applied case-studies in class.

Student worksheet answers

Download the teachers notes PDF to access the answers for this lesson.