• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.177-187
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• 2006

Due to a lack of reproducibility and visibility of the conventional equipment for westerly wave simulation, it is difficult to have indoor experiments at high school that show the stream of Hadley cell. A modified improvement of the old one improves the problem. The side wall and bottom of the new equipment is made by copper and acrylic resin, respectively, in order to clarify the difference between the water temperature inside and outside of the water tank. The equipment also has a high quality digital record for generating exact analysis of the results. And we also carried out several experiments that relate theoretical and experimental aspection of westerly wave. Temperature Detected Sheet (TDS) in flow visualization unit provides not only visual information of liquid flow, but also clear understanding of the relation between upper and lower wind flow structure. And the liquid stream simulated in indoor experiment using proposed equipment is commensurate with westerly wave in real atmosphere. The efficiency of educational properties of the proposed equipment is verified indirectly by Likert Scales survey of high school teachers.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.24-34
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• 2017

The westerly waves generation is described in the advanced earth science textbook used at high school as follows: as westerly wind approaches and blows over large mountains, the air flow shows wave motions in downwind side, which can be explained by the conservation of potential vorticity. However, there has been no case study showing the phenomena of the mesoscale westerly waves with observational data in the area of small mountains in Korea. And thus the wind speed and time persistency of westerly winds along with the width and length of mountains have never been studied to explain the generation of the westerly waves. As a first step, we assured the westerly waves generated in the downwind side of Sobaek mountains based on surface station wind data nearby. Furthermore, the critical or minimum wind velocity of the westerly wind over Sobaek mountains to generate the downwind wave were derived and calcuated tobe about $0.6m\;s^{-1}$ for Sobaek mountains, which means that the westerly waves could be generated in most cases of westerly blowing over the mountains. Using surface station data and 4-dimensional assimilation data of RDAPS (Regional Data Assimilation and Prediction System) provided by Korea Meteorological Agency, we also analyzed cases of westerly waves occurrence and life cycle in the downwind side of Sobaek mountains for a year of 2014. The westerly waves occurred in meso-${\beta}$ or -${\gamma}$ scales. The westerly waves generated by the mountains disappeared gradually with wind speed decreasing. The occurrence frequency of the vorticity with meso-${\beta}$ scale got to be higher when the stronger westerly wind blew. When we extended the spatial range of the analysis, phenomena of westerly waves were also observed in the downwind side of Yensan mountains in Northeastern China. Our current work will be a study material to help students understand the atmospheric phenomena perturbed by mountains.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.402-408
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• 2004

The purpose of this study is to investigate various conceptions of secondary school earth science teachers on some concepts in secondary school earth science courses; wind in cyclone, western intensification of ocean current, westerly wave, greenhouse effect, ozone layer and atmospheric pressure. The subject is 26 in-service teachers of earth science teachers. The results were analyzed on the view of teaching sources for earth science teachers. The results show that earth science teachers have also various misconceptions on some concepts selected in this study. A number of partial understandings were found that were not enough to apply to teaching concepts. Those misconceptions were related to gradient wind on wind in cyclone and frictional force, related to earth rotation on western intensification of ocean current, related to angular momentum conservation and related to the roles of westerly wave. And misconceptions on greenhouse effect are related to main role of greenhouse effect gases, related to sources of ozone gas and phenomenons by atmospheric pressure. The various understanding types found in this study could be apply to teach the selected concepts in secondary school earth science course.