Ven la tarea una

Samantha Woolley
OU ID: 112853577
GEOG 1114: 020
September 18, 2012
Homework #1-Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, Cuba
As I was looking through the list of locations for these assignments, the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park in Cuba really caught my eye because I have always wanted to visit the Caribbean, specifically, Cuba. I am a Spanish and Political Science double major and Ilove the Spanish language so I thought that this would be a great place to research. I found many great websites and resources for this particular national park.
According to The Encyclopedia of the Earth (www.eoearth.org), this “Parque Nacional” covers most of the central part of the Saqua-Baracpa mountain range. The latitude for Alejandro de Humboldt National Park is 20°22’N-20°35’N(www.eoearth.org) and the longitude is 74°38’W-75°10W (www.eoearth.org). This national park has an elevation from -220m to 1,175m. The highest point is El Toldo Peak, as described in the The Encyclopedia of the Earth website. It is located in the Northern Hemisphere, as well as the Western Hemisphere. The park is located in Cuba, which is a part of the Caribbean Islands. The Alejandro de Humboldt National Parkis spread out into two provinces, Guantánamo and Holguín. The time zone is UTC-5 hours.
On the next few pages, I found three maps of the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. The first one can be found on a Cuban site, (www.iga.cu) which is dedicated to Geography and Astronomy. There are many articles and I found a very useful article on my location, Artículo 3 de la Revista Ciencias de la Tierray el Espacio. This map is probably the most practical because it shows the entire country and where the national park is located compared to each province. The second map was the easiest to find because I just used Google Maps (https://maps.google.com/) and typed in Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, Cuba. This particular map is good because it is a little bit closer up and there is the obviousmarker of where it can be found. The last map was found on my main website, World Heritage Committee (http://whc.unesco.org), and it is the best example of the exact shape and certain points of interest, like El Toldo.

In Guántanamo, Cuba, the solar insolation, temperature and precipitation varies from month to month. As described by solarinsolation.org, “solar insolation is a measure ofsolar radiation energy received on a given surface area in a given time.” In January, according to GAISMA, Cuba experiences 4.10 kWh/m²/day and it increases up to 7.16 kWh/m²/day in May. In December, it reaches its lowest point of 3.74 kWh/m²/day (gaisma.org). In high school, I learned that temperatures remained constant in countries that are near a body of water. Since Cuba is an island, thetemperature barely changes from season to season. Gaisma.org displays a table of monthly temperatures starting with January, whose temperature is 21.42 °C. August is 26.87 °C and December is 22.22 °C. Unlike temperature, precipitation has many extreme values throughout the year. January has 68 mm then there is a big increase in June with 194 mm (gaisma.org). It remains high through October. There is an 89mm drop from October (164 mm) to November (75 mm) (gaisma.org). The year ends with 55 mm in December (gaisma.org). These statistics show that the summer and fall months are full of rain, compared to the winter months.
As I was researching this homework assignment, I found many useful facts and maps in our book, Geosystems by Christopherson. Day length is “the duration of exposure to insolation”and it also is a steady change between seasons (Christopherson 48). In Cuba, the day length varied by almost three hours in 2011. As found on timeanddate.com, the average time of daylight was a little over 12 hours. The shortest day length, as expected, was in the winter months with 10 hours 47 minutes from December 16 to December 28 (timeanddate.com). The longest days were in June, from the...