One of the ironies of teaching mathematics is that real-life problems, although interesting, are often too difficult to consider in a secondary school classroom. Consequently the problems that are used in texts are often somewhat contrived. While working at the local weather office, I came upon several applications of trigonometry that are both interesting and instructive for high school students. The problems require that some background knowledge be presented to the students, but often they will have at least heard about the ideas from the nightly weather forecasts on television. These ideas make an interesting discussion for both teacher and student.
