How Storms Are Studied: teacher key

Hurricanes and Tornadoes, grade 10 edition, written for 10th grade. How do scientists explain a hurricane and a tornado? See the heat and the spin behind each storm, and the radar, aircraft, balloons and satellites that watch them.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What powers a hurricane, according to the pages?
   • Cold land
   • Heat released when water vapor condenses (answer)
   • Tornadoes
2. What led NOAA to build a nationwide network of Doppler radars?
   • Rainfall records
   • The discovery of the Tornado Vortex Signature (answer)
   • The 1960 satellite
3. A hurricane moves over land, where little water evaporates. What is likely to happen to it?
   • It fades (answer)
   • It grows into a tornado
   • It speeds up
4. How did the original Fujita scale get its precise wind speeds?
   • From instruments
   • From satellites
   • They were guesses not verified by tests (answer)
5. In VORTEX2, how many mobile radars did researchers deploy?
   • 2
   • 10 (answer)
   • 40

Words

• latent: hidden
• radiosonde: balloon instrument
• mesocyclone: rotating updraft
• Coriolis: spin effect
• geostationary: fixed in place
• deflection: a bend