The Magic School Bus: Through the Hurricane

Author: (American) Cole
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Five-star top-rated by readers on Amazon.com. The best-selling, most award-winning, and most popular Magic School Bus has arrived in China! A bold and unconventional teacher; a magically transforming school bus; an easy and humorous classroom; fun and easy-to-understand science; thrilling and exciting experiences—all in the science book, "The Magic School Bus!" Recommended by the National Library of the United States for all preschool and elementary school children as a natural supplemental reading material. With a global circulation exceeding 58 million copies, it is one of Scholastic's signature books.
A typhoon (called a hurricane in the Atlantic) is a massive atmospheric vortex formed in tropical oceans. The fierce winds and heavy rains it brings often cause severe damage to life and property in coastal areas. However, for some regions, typhoon rains are an indispensable source of water. Growing up in a small town on the southeastern coast, I had to endure the "baptism" of typhoons every summer. The most unforgettable memory was a summer when a powerful typhoon overturned my neighbor's small tiled house, claiming the lives of two of my playmates. It was out of fascination with this giant monster, the typhoon, that I began to study and research meteorology.
Today, meteorologists have established millions of weather stations around the world, using various instruments to measure air temperature, the amount of water vapor in the air, rainfall and snowfall, wind direction and speed, cloud cover, and cloud height. They employ balloons, airplanes, rockets, and other detection tools to measure changes in the entire atmosphere, especially meteorological satellites, which provide vivid images of the entire cloud system over the Earth in real-time, leaving almost no typhoon undetected. With the help of fast-running, high-capacity computers, meteorologists can process and analyze vast amounts of observational data, simulate the movement and changes of typhoons using mathematical methods, and predict when and where they will land, as well as the intensity of wind and rain along their paths.
Meteorologists have also discovered that the paths and number of typhoon landings vary each summer, and the intensity of wind and rain they bring also differs. Therefore, accurately predicting typhoons remains a significant challenge. Could global warming alter the frequency of typhoon occurrences, their intensity, or even their paths? There are still countless mysteries in the Earth's atmosphere waiting for us to explore.
A hurricane is raging over the tropical ocean, and a strange yellow object is being swept into its vortex. It's a hot air balloon. It's an airplane. It's the Magic School Bus! Miss Frizzle's class didn't visit the meteorological observatory for a tour; instead, they experienced the hurricane firsthand from land, sea, and air. In this best-selling, new edition of the science book, readers can learn how changes in the air affect the weather. When you find yourself in the midst of a hurricane, wind, rain, thunder, and lightning will take on a whole new look!