Monday, February 1, 2010

Chapter 3: Sailing

Five days into the sailing trip Jesse was having serious regrets. What had begun as unbearably exciting had become torture. Barely an hour after setting out to sea, his normally baritone voice went quiet and he sat pale faced in one corner of the boat. He felt fuzzy headed and nauseous.  After two hours, he started vomiting. The captain and her assistant initially laughed off the incident as one more passenger working to earn his sea legs. To his chagrin, nobody else showed any sign of sea-sickness. Even after his stomach calmed down, his head continued to pound. Jesse decided that laying down in his bunk was his only option. He basically stayed there for entire days at a time, only venturing out when they made landfall at some island.  
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He had just accepted his first real job as a meteorologist for the local television station. It occurred to him to book this sailing cruise to celebrate his new career move as well as to acquire some important real world weather experience that he was lacking after living in academia for so long. The wrenching lurches and lunges of this boat quickly took away both the celebration and the real weather experience.
Jesse knew that September was a very interesting time in the Caribbean. The weather was balmy but fresh breezes hinted at changes to come. The ocean was water was its warmest temperature of the year.
The Captain stopped laughing off Jesse’s illness. She was serious when she brought Jesse water and some Dramamine. She insisted he come above board and take the helm of the ship as they sailed.  She told him to set his sight on the horizon as a way to combat the nausea and headaches. She set off to work on the sails. 
He looked out over the horizon. It was no longer the light blue contrasting the deeper hue of open sea. Dark clouds were gathering quickly. The breeze turned into a wind and the sea grew choppy. The Captain and her nephew started tying down equipment, tightening the sail and telling the other passengers to go inside.  Jesse knew that some serious weather was coming their way and he cursed himself for not looking into it more seriously before booking this trip. If anybody on this ship could predict the weather, it should be him.
The captain came hurriedly towards Jesse, wet from the waves crashing in on them from all directions. 
“We’re in trouble. We need to send out an SOS to any ships nearby. Go down in the cabin to the radio. You should also check the radar to see if there are any land masses close by. Move it!”
Jesse scrambled down the hatch. Sea sickness had been replaced with dread.
Your task:
Radars are radio wave sent from a radar station and reflected by the target to the station, causing a spike to appear on the wavy line. The indicator is marked so that the number under the spike shows the distance in miles from the station to the target. The left screen supplies data from the shore radar station at A, the right screen from B. How can you use the 75 and 90 numbers on the indicators to locate a target? Exactly where is the target on an extension of this map? Draw this map. What assumptions did you need to make to solve this problem.

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