Rodney the Raindrop's Big Adventure in Weather By Grace Yerrid and Nathan Sims
Chapter One Rodney the water droplet lives in a quiet little pond with his millions of brothers and sisters. Life isn't so bad as a droplet, and Rodney is content with his peaceful life. One day, Rodney decides to float on the water's surface so he can bask in the relaxing sunlight. The sun's rays are so relaxing, and soon Rodney is fast asleep. Little did he know that soon his entire life would be changed.
As Rodney is sleeping, the sun's light begins to heat his tiny liquid body. Pop! Suddenly Rodney is being evaporated! Now in the form of water vapor, Rodney begins to rise higher and higher into the cloudless sky. Around him, all of his brothers and sisters on the surface of the water also begin to evaporate. Now that Rodney is a non-dense liquid, he begins to make his journey into the layers of the Atmosphere.
Chapter Two As Rodney rises into the first level of the Atmosphere, the Troposphere, he notices that as he goes higher, the air around him becomes cooler. That is because as he rises, there is less warm oxygen around him. When will I stop rising? He wondered, gazing down at the pond that he once called home.
Now Rodney is in the Stratosphere. The air up there is really cold, but Rodney doesn't mind it too much. He is more interested in meeting the other water vapor from all over the world. "How did you all get here?" He politely asks a particle from a lake in Texas. "How'd I get here? Well, let me tell ya sonny, I was just mindin' my own business, and suddenly, poof! I find myself here!" Rodney turns to face a hawaiian particle. "It's because we got too hot and the sun evaporated us!" He said. Rodney then asked where they were headed. Another water vapor particle piped into the conversation. "I heard that we were heading into the Mesosphere, and then into the Thermosphere." Rodney felt a little better about knowing where he was going, but he still felt like the worst was yet to come.
Chapter Three "Why are there hardly any wind currents up here?" Rodney asked for what felt like the hundredth time. Next to him, the Hawaiian water vapor stiffened. "I told you already. Wind currents are formed by differences in air pressure. And because we are well above the mesosphere, there is only high air pressure, and not enough low air pressure to create wind." There was a pause. "Oh, sorry." Rodney mumbled. "You used to live in Hawaii, right?" The raindrop nodded. "What about ocean currents?"
"Well, ocean currents form when the wind pushes the ocean. The currents are constantly changing, just like the weather." The Hawaiian water vapor said. "Is is fun living in the ocean?" Rodney wondered out loud. Before the water vapor could answer his question, Rodney suddenly began to feel heavy. What's happening to me? His body began to change, growing bigger and darker. I'm turning into a cloud!
Chapter Four "What's happening to us?" A water vapor asked. Currently everyone was loosely thrown together, forming a wispy white cloud. "We've turned into a cirrus cloud!" Rodney exclaimed. "It's because we've turned into tiny ice crystals." Another crystal chimed in. "In a few more days, we'll become stratus clouds, and we'll all stick together!" Excitement buzzed all around Rodney. "Does that mean that we all get to go back to Earth?" Another droplet gasped. "Yeah, if we freeze any more, we'll become either sleet, hail, or snow!"
"What if we don't freeze?" Rodney asked. "Then we turn back into water droplets and rain back to the ground as precipitation." Rodney was excited to finally be going home, but he was going to miss the fun life of water vapor. But then again, it was going to happen to him once more in a few weeks because the water cycle always continued. "We're a cumulus cloud now!" Someone shouted. They were indeed a fluffy cloud of condensation.
Chapter Five Rodney knew that they were now condensation because of the dew point, but he had no idea what the dew point actually had to do with their situation. When he asked a fellow droplet, he learned that because the dew point was rising, the temperature was dropping, creating the condensation that he was now. With this information, Rodney knew that soon his time in the clouds would be over.
The air was chilled, and the sky turned a somber grey. Rodney's cloud began to rumble, and all of the raindrops waited anxiously to fall back down to earth. There was a flash of lightning, and suddenly Rodney was tumbling towards the ground at top speed. He expected to fall into the ocean, but something was terribly wrong. The wind was so powerful, it lifted him higher into the air. The cloud that he was once nestled in had turned into a swirling mass of wind and rain. It's a hurricane! He realized with a start as he collided with a large piece of wood. Where did that come from? He wondered, barely catching a glimpse of the wood before it was wrenched back into the maelstrom of the hurricane. With a howling cry from the wind, Rodney was tossed out of the storm, where he landed with a painful thud on a glass window.
Chapter Six Rodney clung to the window as the wind whipped around him. He peered into the glass, seeing a few humans operating alien machinery. On the little screen, Rodney could see a man pointing to a strange map. It had weird symbols, and tiny cloud diagrams. Much to his surprise, Rodney could see the hurricane, and another odd symbol.
"Amazing! The hurricane continues to grow, even when it's taken in gallons of evaporated water!" One of the men in the car exclaimed. "And look, wind speeds are up to two hundred miles per hour!" They were both silenced by the third man. "Listen, you two! If you look here, you can see that the tornado and the hurricane are both heading towards each other. That means that we will have a monstrous tornado-hurricane on our hands!" From his position on the window, Rodney could see the tornado forming on one of the Storm Chaser's screens. Apparently there was a large storm brewing in the middle of the country. Two large masses of air (one warm and one cold) had collided, swirling up until they created a deadly tornado. And on top of that, Rodney's cloud-hurricane was heading straight for the tornado.
Chapter Seven During his time on the car window, Rodney learned that the storm chasers were scientists who studied extreme weather patterns, such as warm and cold fronts.The tornado formed because the warm and cold fronts combined. There were also occluded and stationary fronts. Stationary fronts form when warm and cold air meet, but they don't do anything. The air remains stationary, which is why it was called a stationary front.
Occluded fronts happened because one warm air mass was caught between two cold air masses and had nowhere to go. The scientists got all their information through meteorological instruments and satellite images. The scientists used barometers to measure the pressure changes in the air, anemometers calculated wind speed, wind vanes showed wind directions, and hygrometers measured the levels of precipitation. To get images of the storms, there was a satellite outside of the thermosphere that could take pictures and send them to the scientists digitally.
Chapter Eight As Rodney was looking around the car's interior, a brightly colored map caught his eye. It was titled ISOTHERM MAP and showed the different temperatures of the land mass on the weather map. There were many lines on the map, signifying where the temperatures were the same. Those were the isotherm bars.
Suddenly, Rodney's body felt a warm breeze coming from the engine of the car. The engine's heat was creating convection, and he suddenly began to slide down the windowpane. The warm air was causing more water vapor to gather on the window, making it harder for Rodney to stay put. Sliding even further down the slick glass, Rodney saw something long and black moving toward him. Suddenly, the black stick grabbed hold of him and flung Rodney into a puddle nearby. The rain soon ended, the clouds began to clear, and Rodney felt the sun's warm rays shining down on him. Reflecting on the day's adventure, he began to mingle with the other water droplets, glad to know that he would soon get to go on another adventure very soon.
Nathan's Contributions
All graphical and text edits Weather and isotherm map Got graphics/pictures and backgrounds and put them in
Grace's Contributions
Came up with the idea and how to incorporate everything Wrote the whole story Made sure the vocab words and topics were included