Testing a hypothesis by Derwent Water

If you've seen the new Star Wars film, you might recognise Derwent Water, which was in about 30 minutes of the film. We're expecting crowds later in the year, but there weren't many people around today. The new sign boards had a testable statement: that it would take 2 minutes to walk to the lake. If you can test that prediction, then we could call it an hypothesis. So I did time it. I'm not a slow walker but it took me nearly 3 minutes. Is the hypothesis correct? Well, we'd need to test it on many more people and on many more occasions. One piece of data is a start but more is needed. I could do repeat readings myself. They won't all be the same although they should be similar. These small variations would be called RANDOM ERROR. It is important to have control variables in any test to make it fair. So the same person would be a start because a person with longer legs might get there in less time because each stride takes them further. If we then found that it worked with different people, we could say that the test was REPRODUCIBLE because different people had done it and got the same pattern. These are some of the scientific investigation words we've been learning this week. And sadly no sign of Princess Leia today... :(

Wind power on Gran Canaria

I spent time on the Canary Islands wondering about how you supply electricity to such isolated communities. We have such centralised power stations and a big grid. I'd have thought it would have been through renewables, but apparently not. Our guide on Gran Canaria quoted a figure of 3% of their electricity coming from wind power. That's despite this article that I found http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/06/wind-power-spain-electricity-2013 which says that a lot of Spanish electricity now comes from renewables. But I loved the comment underneath the article from someone claiming that the turbines pictured above spend most of their time at rest! The Canaries are served by Trade Winds from the north east and the scirocco from the Sahara. These turbines are on the east side of the island so should be well positioned.

Solar observatory on Mount Teide

 The Mount Teide volcano National Park on Tenerife has an observatory as well. This time it's a solar observatory for looking at our nearest star.

You might wonder why they'd put a telescope there. But look at the view from above it looking down. The clouds that are blown in by the Trade Winds are well below the level of the telescope so there will always be good views of the Sun. You can tell from the arid landscape that it doesn't rain much - although there were small patches of snow on the top of Mount Teide itself. Also, being about half way to the Equator from Wigton, the differences in daylight hours between winter and summer are much less severe.

Power station in Portugal

Taken from a moving coach, I think that this is the Ribatejo natural gas power station on the outskirts of Lisbon. It is one of the biggest in Portugal in terms of power output, having a capacity of 1176MW according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Portugal It looks a lot smaller than the UK power stations I'm used to but I'm not sure it's capacity is that much lower. For example, Ferrybridge looks massive but has just under double the capacity. I was taken by the red and white chimneys and pylons. I can't find a reason but surely it is for aircraft. Why don't aircraft seem to be a problem in the UK? Also, they say that one third of the white storks in Portugal nest on pylons. But that can't be the reason because the chimneys are painted.

Force 9 in the Bay of Biscay

This is what Force 9 looks like. I took the photo so that I could write about the Beaufort Scale. I've found out that Beaufort was a naval officer nearly 200 years ago and the scale was an attempt to standardise the wind speed reports to help the sailing ships that were what the navy used in those days. He gave accurate descriptions of what should happen. These days it is linked to wind speed. In our case, it mean that the swell was about 10 metres high. It's an interesting example of an attempt to put numbers to something that was difficult to measure at the time.

Seeing: Telescopes on La Palma

One of the things that I really wanted to see in La Palma was the collection of telescopes. Turns out that they are perched high on the rim of the gigantic caldera. I finally spotted them through binoculars! They are high on the mountain because they get better "seeing". Stars twinkle because of the motion of layers of air in the atmosphere. Even on cold nights there is often a lot of convection round here as the land cools down. Air of different temperatures means different refractive indices so images get bent and then move as the layers move - there's the twinkling. The higher you are, the less air above so the less distortion. The volcanoes in the Canaries poke out above the main cloud layer. There is also little light pollution because so few people live on La Palma. The views are simply better.

The air gets colder as you get higher: Arnison Crag

We went into the hills for the first time this year, climbing small hills above Patterdale. No temperature inversion here: the air clearly gets colder as you get higher hence the precipitation is snow higher up. You can see a few flakes in the second photograph. So does the precipitation start as snow and then melt on the way down to lower levels? Is it just because it has to fall further and down into the warmer air? And why would the air be warmer closer to the ground on a miserable day like today with no sun?