How do we know if it is cold or warm? How much has it been raining? Are plants happy or unhappy? With portable weather stations deployed at schools, we are monitoring temperature, wind direction, wind velocity, and precipitation in the Uatumã Sustainable Reserve, along the Uatumã river, in the Central Amazon.

Every day, we can go out to the stations and write down the temperature, wind direction, wind velocity, and precipitation. If you have received an account to the site, you can upload these numbers and they will be included in the figure below.

If we collect these numbers every day, the figure will improve. Let’s see if we can construct an evolution of the temperature, wind and precipitation during a whole month!

Where do clouds come from? What is wind? To find out, watch these videos! Using simple science experiments, we will discover what air is, that air is heavy, how we can make air move, and how we can create the clouds that you see in the sky on a daily basis. Try it out yourself, together with your teacher.

If plants “sweat”, then how does the water exit the plants? Plants have very small mouths called stomata. These mouths are located on the leaves. When plants breathe during the day, they inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen and water vapor. Humans (and other animals) inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide and water vapor. You can see this by breathing on the surface of a mirror. Like plants, we exhale water, and the water becomes visible on the mirror, just like clouds in the sky are visible forms of water.

The mouths of plants are about 1000x smaller than our mouths, so we cannot see them with the naked eye. However, we can zoom in on them with a microscope!