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The Physics Teacher -- February 2006 -- Volume 44, Issue 2, pp. 85

Sine Waves in the Snow

Albert A. Bartlett

University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO

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Last summer our neighbors put up a new, high board fence whose horizontal top board was approximately 10 cm wide. This top board quickly became a superhighway for squirrels. Figure 1 shows the top of the fence after the winter's first snowfall. One squirrel running in the snow on top of the fence has left the snow neatly sculptured into a good approximation of a sine wave. If the top of the fence is designated y = 0 and x is measured horizontally along the top of the fence, the equation for the approximate sine wave would be:
math

© 2006 American Association of Physics Teachers

KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

physics education, educational aids, waveform analysis, snow, amplitude estimation

PACS

  • 01.50.My

    Demonstration experiments and apparatus

  • 62.30.+d

    Mechanical and elastic waves; vibrations

History
Online Jan 2006

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

0031-921X (print)  

Publisher

$abstract.society.value is a Member of CrossRef American Association of Physics Teachers

ARTICLE DATA

Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.2165435


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