Jackson Mid School (54)

The Jackson Mid School team (#54) is from Albuquerque. This year they've submitted a project titled Effects of Massive Rainfall in Desert Climate.

Team Members

 * Aidan OHara
 * Nolan Fisk

Sponsoring Teacher
Karen Glennon

Proposal
This year we are participating in Supercomputing Challenge after having been in GUTS for a period of time. This is a late submission to the Proposals.

Problem
Deserts growing and what that does to water, animals and plants. We want to look at the affect on the ecosystems of other places around the desert.

Importance
This can affect how much water supplies get to cities. How the growth in cities affect the water available. What happens to the desert habitat.

Plan or Purpose
to experiment with methods of preventing depletion of the desert habitat and the importance of the eco systems. We are aware we need to limit what we present and research in the habitat but we have not come up with that yet.

We will use Starlogo to simulate how all of the participants in the habitat will change.

Interim Report
http://mode.lanl.k12.nm.us/get_interim1112.php?team_id=54

Area of Science: Environmental Interaction

PROBLEM DEFINITION
IN the world today there are hundreds of climates and hundreds more in the universe. Many of these climates are those such as the amazons in South America, or the frozen Tundra of Antarctica. Or even the grassy plains in North America. There is one particular type of climate that we live in though. A Dry and Hot climate is what Albuquerque NM and the areas surrounding it. We get little rain and have a mild change in climate compared to areas such a NYC and Juneau, with Just under freezing temperatures and high 80’s and 90’s. But what would happen to the climate and ecosystem if a rainstorm of such massive proportions sat on the state for a time, we have yet to determine it. The goal would be to determine the effects and determine an efficient way to prepare for or negate them. Part of the problem is our lack of knowledge with Star Logo TNG.

PROBLEM SOLUTION
We plan on using Star Logo TNG for our simulation and we will be testing the effect of rainfall in a Hot and Dry climate such as New Mexico. In more exact observation we are testing what would happen to a river such as the Rio Grande if there were to be a massive rainstorm. In this simulation some of the factors affecting the result would be the terrain of the area of rainfall as well as the position of the river in the terrain

PROGRESS TO DATE
As of Today our progress has been small. We have learned how to create the right color on out star Logo space land. We have researched and read and found 3 resources. All of which about the desert, only the last two have been about our project now. The First of the two is a book about desert climate. The second is a newspaper article on the effect of drought. The newspaper is the Albuquerque Journal. We figure we can negate the effects and produce results. We have also figured out what our project is about.

EXPECTED RESULTS
We hope to show that the large amount of rainfall will cause flooding, erosion and damage of any surrounding areas in the simulation and we are looking to see the overall condition of the terrain. We are also looking to see if there is a way to prevent or reduce the damage the rainfall.

Interim Comments
David Rogers Lead of the Scalable Data Analysis and Visualization Group at Sandia National Laboratories

Hi. Looks like and interesting project - weather and climate simulation are a big topic in computer science right now, so this is a really good basis for a Challenge entry.

From your report, it sounds like you're making progress in both the research and computing aspects of the problem, so that's great. I'd concentrate on thinking about and designing the simplest Star Logo program that can help answer questions about your problem, and then coding that program. With Star Logo, you can get a lot of interesting results pretty quickly if you first think through what type of questions you want to explore. Also, it's often useful to make your model very simple - what's the simplest representation of a river and a storm that you can use to answer some questions about the Rio Grande?

Keep at it - I look forward to seeing your results!

Patricia Meyer GUTS Facilitator

Getting up to speed in Star Logo can inhibit your progress, hopefully the past weeks addition of a mentor is helping you.

David Rogers is right, at this point you do need to go simple. If you had had the time it might've been interesting to build some type of erosion or silt build up into your model. I know pooling of the rain has been an issue.

Your research should at least give you the variables that would effect your model even if you didn't get to actually programming them. That way you can present what the model would've had had you had time and experience to complete it. This will make your presentation stronger.

Good luck! I know you have put time in attempting to program this model.