The environment: hazards and opportunities

Look at our Fisherman's Village, located next to the beach, at the foot of a hillside. What could possibly go wrong with that location? Apart from the odd mudslip, landslide, or rockfall? What do they know anyhow?

Think about the range of ideal/foolhardy places you've seen people live.

We could consider it this week, especially as you're visiting an active volcano.

Let's eat cake

It's the end of another section! We need to complete this properly in the traditional home education style.

Can we invent a weather, climate, and natural vegetation cake?

Relationship of climate and vegetation

This week, explore the outdoors in detailed ways. Stand at the sea edge to examine the vegetation; as we cross the mountain, look at the grass and shrub types; when we're in town, examine the planting; in the botanic gardens, let's look at the trees.

Go through each of the charts at the Hong Kong Observatory site, looking for temperature range, rainfall patterns, humidity levels, wind speeds, cloud covers and so on.

How do these patterns affect the vegetation you'd expect to find in this particular sub-tropical environment?

Think of your travels in tropical rainforests in Australia; what was similar and what was different?

Tropical rainforest & hot dry desert

What would you expect of the climate and vegetation in both a tropical rainforest and a hot dry desert? (Remember your experiences in Australia and Yemen?)

To read general information on tropical rainforests, try Geography Learn on the Internet. For information on the tropical rainforests on Papua New Guinea, and for considerations on the impact of human activity, try Barcelona Field Studies Centre.

For tropical desert, try this.
For Wiki info on the Arabian desert.

Youtube deserts landscape lecture from David Nash at the University of Brighton. It's an hour long, accessible and interesting, so set yourself up with a comfortable, quiet place.

Could you explain and give examples of the way climate and vegetation work together to help build an ecosystem? Can you give me examples of the impact of human intervention?

How do we measure the weather?

'Describe the methods of collecting and measuring meteorological data.'

Well, thanks to the British pastime of weather observation, there are hundreds of websites devoted to the instruments and measurements of weather.

And you can always set up a weather station right outside, collecting data on wind speed, rainfall, humidity and temperature.

Look at Clouds R Us to choose and make instruments. I'll pick out some points from this Wikibooks page. Learn names of clouds gently on youtube.

And keep your eyes on this brilliant weather site please, since it is fantastically informative to all sub-tropical weather watchers. The Hong Kong Observatory.

Review week

Look back over the weeks, watch the videos, keep a notebook if that's what you're doing, and generally do some staring at mountains and poking about in sand and soil to give me a reason to go berserk in Starbucks before I post up the next module.