PROCEDURE:
1. Nail the wood square to the 12 dowel rod
2. Glue two wooden rulers together at their centers. The rulers
should be glued at a 90º angle to one another. Make sure the holes
line up with room to place a nail through them.
3. Place a washer between the dowel rod and the rulers and attach
the cross to the dowel rod using the remaining nail. The nail should
go through the hole in the rulers.
4. Use two thumb tacks per cup and attach a paper cup to each end of
both rulers.
5. Use a red marker or red paint and put a large X on one of the cups.
6. Take your anemometer outside and measure the wind speed. To do
so, count the number of times the cup with the red mark passes in
front of you in 30 seconds. Multiply by two to get
revolutions/rotations per minute (rpm).
OBSERVATIONS:
1. What was the wind speed?
2. If the number of turns made in 30 seconds was 15, what would the
wind speed be?
3. What would the wind speed be if the anemometer made 40 turns in
30 seconds?
CONCLUSIONS:
1. How does the structure of an anemometer allow you to measure
wind speed?
2. How might your anemometer be less accurate than the ones that
weather forecasters (meteorologists) use?
3. Are there any structural design flaws that might have decreased
the accuracy of the anemometer you built?
4. How big does an anemometer have to be to measure wind speed?
If you made a bigger anemometer, would the wind speed you
measured change? If you made a smaller anemometer, would the
wind speed you measured change?