How Cold in Caribou Country?
In our last Challenge Question we also asked how cold it was for Caribou # 6977 on February 6th. According to this temperature map which was downloaded from the Purdue University Weather Processor, it appears to have been a balmy 0 F on that day at 7 am local time. (The time “1400 Z” printed on the map stands for 14:00 o’clock “Zulu”. This refers to the time in Greenwich, England. Since the caribou are 7 time zones to the west of Greenwich, it was 7 hours earlier, or 7 am.) Although they were far away, Ms. Talbert’s students in California came the closest with their guess of -3F. Here’s what they did: “First we figured out where the caribou was by using the longitude and latitude on a map. When we found where he was, we used the newspaper to find out his temperature. We found that he is at -3 F.” (ltalbert@mail.mcn.org) Chris Gowan and Andrew Baumann, Ms McGinley’s students in Maryville, Tennessee came close also with an estimate of -10 F. “We found this information that was on a Web S
