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Have you ever been to the beach in the morning and noticed the breeze coming off the land towards the ocean?

Sailors always raise the sail on their boats in the early morning because the breeze will push the boat out to sea. The reverse is true in the evening. Fishermen will raisetheir sail and the breeze will push the boat from the sea back towards the land. Today we’ll learn why the morning land breezes and the afternoon sea breezes work in the way that they do.

All you’ll need for this experiment are two plastic bowls or dishes, twothermometers, some water and some soil.

Here’s what you do:

Take your two plastic containers and fill one with water and one with the soil. Leave them in a shady spot until the temperatures of thewater and the soil are the same. You can tell by putting the thermometers into them. Once they are about the same temperature, you can begin the test. Take the thermometers and place one back into thesoil and one back into the water. Make sure the thermometer bulb is pretty deep into each container and you can allow the top half of the thermometer to lean on the side of the container so that you can easily read it. Place the two plastic dishes in direct sunlight and check onthem frequently. You are looking to see which one heats up faster. You’ll see that the soil heats up and cools off a lot quicker than the water. And because of this fact, you can see how the morning landbreeze and evening sea breeze occur. From the early morning until the afternoon, the sun is heating up the land and the air above it. The ocean water is getting warmer as well, just not ask quickly. So whenthe warm air from the land rises, the cooler air above the ocean moves in toward the land. The warm land cools at night faster than the water, so overnight the ocean water becomes warmer than the land. This causes the warm air above the ocean to rise and the cooler air from the land to move out toward the sea.

Now you know what sailors and fishermen have known and used for many, many years!