November 15, 2009 How Cold Are the Dry Valleys?

It might look cold, but how cold is it???

After living in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica for more than three weeks I will admit that they are cold, but how cold are they? We set up a data logger on our front porch to take temperature, relative humidity, and dew point readings every 6 hours to see how cold it was outside. In the following activity students can use our actual data to graph the temperature readings for our first week and our last week to see how the temperatures changed by hour and by day.

The data logger that I used for this experiment collected temperature, relative humidity, and dew point data every six hours for the entire time I was in the Dry Valleys.

If you had to guess…Do you think this area gets a lot of precipitation? Do you think that it is humid? Do you think that it is windy here?