Hurricanes, windspeed, surface

We need to consider the general and recurring problem of how do you find information you need? Are there some general principles or strategies, applicable to any subject? Are there places where you can find everything you need? Are there pitfalls you should know about before crashing off into the underbrush?

We'll take an example that has a certain plausability for a physics course, but really much the same could be done in any other discipline, and what we look at here should be generally applicable.

Your physics professor wants to convince you that the abstractions of physics help to understand phenomena that we experience all the time. He cites the example of a hurricane as a simple heat engine:
As the sun beats down over tropical seas, the moist air becomes heated and starts to rise. More moisture-laden air is sucked into the warm core of the storm center, and the whole system is given a spiral twist by the rotation of the earth.

AS the air ascends within the column, it expands in the reduced pressures of the upper atmosphere, and cools by expansion. By this cooling, moisture is condensed, which in turn releases heat to the surrounding atmosphere of the storm core, thus regenerating the heat cycle. This acts to intensify the storm.

The rising air flows out from the system at various heights and at the top, mixing with the cooler surrounding atmosphere where it starts to sink. This condition results in lower pressures in the center of the column and higher pressures outside, creating the kinetic mechanical energy --wind.
(from Tufty 1001 Questions Answered about Hurricanes, Tornadoes... [QC941.8 .T84 1987])

So, says he, what happens to the speed of the wind as the hurricane comes ashore and starts to pass over land? The hurricane's 'fuel' is warm water vapor, so you'd think that passage over land would act to diminish windspeed... and that's usually true, but in 1989 Hurricane Hugo got quite far inland before its winds dropped below 74 MPH (the dividing line beween 'hurricane' and 'storm').
So here's your problem: how do you find out more about hurricanes, and particularly how do you find out about research that's been done on the subject of windspeed and surfaces?
Begin by thinking about what you need to do: So where do you begin?

The online catalog is a pretty good place to start, and it can't hurt to begin by looking for books. So do a KEYWORD search for hurricane* --and you'll find 56 items in Annie. We can look through this set, or LIMIT it somehow (by date, or location, or some word). For this purpose let's confine ourselves to the 16 books in the Science Library. I e-mailed records for 4 of these to myself: 

  From exporter@iii.library.wlu.edu Sat Sep 12 11:11:04 1998
  Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1998 10:16:24 -0400
  From: Export E-mail 
  To: hblackme@wlu.edu
  Subject: hurr1

  Record 1 of 4
  CALL NO.     QC941.8 .T84 1987.
  AUTHOR       Tufty, Barbara.
  TITLE        1001 questions answered about hurricanes, tornadoes, and other 
                 natural air disasters / Barbara Tufty ; drawings by James 
                 MacDonald.
  IMPRINT      New York : Dover Publications, c1987.
  Record 2 of 4
  CALL NO.     QC944 .R6 1993. 
  AUTHOR       Robinson, Andrew.
  TITLE        Earth shock : hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes and 
                 other forces of nature / Andrew Robinson.
  IMPRINT      New York : Thames and Hudson, 1993.
  Record 3 of 4
  CALL NO.     QC945 .W55 1997.
  AUTHOR       Williams, John M. (John Mills)
  TITLE        Florida hurricanes and tropical storms / John M. Williams and 
                 Iver W. Duedall.
  IMPRINT      Gainesville : University Press of Florida, c1997.
  Record 4 of 4
  CALL NO.     QC945 .P63 1990.
  AUTHOR       Pielke, Roger A.
  TITLE        The hurricane / Roger A. Pielke.
  IMPRINT London ; New York : Routledge, 1990.

Note that these are all QC94xxx --they're shelved together. This is not really a surprise, but it tells you to LOOK NEARBY --to look at the shelves, in the hope that you'll find related materials. It's amazing how often that's a productive strategy.

So there are books to serve as background. Books do have limitations: they may not be all that recent (not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely something to watch out for), and they are more central to some disciplines than to others --in some, it's journal articles that carry the real work of the discipline, and particularly the ongoing research that moves the frontiers of knowledge, so we need to have strategies for finding those articles.

But before we look into research and review literatures we still need to build up a basis for reading and understanding specialized material. And here's where the web can be very useful.

The great advantage of the web is that there's something about pretty much everything, and the various web indexes can help us find stuff; but you do have an evaluative task: how trustworthy is what you find? Really that's not so very different from the problem of information on paper, but one has the illusion that the web is quick and easy and 'complete'. Quick and easy it may be; complete it isn't. But it is useful to help develop knowledge and awareness about a subject. Let's look at some strategies for doing that:

Adding 'and surface' to the advanced search cuts it down to 250 or so. But really the web isn't 'the answer' for this question, and it's necessary to look in more specialized resources.

Another approach you might take to web resources is based on knowing about sites that might have specialized information. Thus, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would be a useful government agency to explore. Their main web page is at http://www.noaa.gov/ and there's a link on their home page to Hurricane Media Central, and from there a link to NOAA's National Hurricane Center. Both of these sites are surely buried somewhere in the links found via YAHOO and AltaVista. Great stuff.

What sorts of indexes and databases are there for information about this subject, and more generally for information about physics and engineering? The ones we have access to can be found on the Library's Physics Department page (see Library Gateway --> Academic Research Guides --> Natural and Physical Sciences --> Physics and Engineering). And for this particular subject (which clearly falls under the 'Environment' rubric) there are a couple of other sources, found under Environmental Studies on the Science Library page.

But let's back up to the general question of how to choose amongst the (many) databases to which we have access.

If, from the Library Gateway, you choose Research Resources on the Internet you'll have a menu of a pretty broad range of tools. Among these is Periodical Indexes, which leads to a menu of more than 15 links, with short descriptions. Some of these are obviously pretty specialized (PsychInfo, MLA Bibliography, MathSciNet, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts), and some are collections of databases (FirstSearch and DIALOG@CARL, most notably); several are general in nature (Expanded Academic Index, Periodical Abstracts Online, LEXIS-NEXIS), and a few are explicitly for pre-electronic journals (Periodicals Contents Index, JSTOR [which is under 'Electronic Journals']). Some have full text, others are just indexes; some have abstracts, and some just give you basic author-title citations. But ALL of these allow some kind of keyword searching, and most have 'advanced' search modes which allow the searcher considerably more flexibility.

But this certainly is a confusion of riches, which is why I've placed links to the most likely databases on the pages for each Science department. Even so, as we see with this search for 'hurricane', it may be useful to look at more than just the Physics Department page.

So we're going to look at these databases, in an effort to find some research articles that seem to be about hurricanes and windspeed or wind speed:

We'll find that no single source has everything; you have to look in several places, and negotiate the particular conventions and search interfaces of multiple databases. This won't change anytime soon, so it's a good opportunity to practise a skill that you'll need for a long time to come.

We'll try the FirstSearch databases first. Once you are authenticated, you are offered "Database Areas" to choose amongst. "Engineering & Technology" and "General Science" seem likely:

(Text of results of some of the above searches)

Another sort of index is provided by professional organizations. Thus, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) has a service called PINET Plus (there's a link from the Physiics & Engineering page), containing the SPIN Database. A search for 'hurricane' produces 98 hits. Adding 'wind' reduces to 39, and 'wind speed' reduces to 7, all of which happen to come from Journal of Geophysical Research, which Annie says we have (though in fact the 7 articles don't seem to be very useful for the question of wind speed over land).