Weather Vocabulary
The imaginary lines that run north to south across the Earth.
What are Lines of Longitude?
Cumulus, cirrus, stratus and lenticular
What are the four main cloud types?
Incoming solar radiation
What does insolation stand for?
Movement of air that is caused by the cold air at the poles and warm air at the equator.
What is wind?
A large body of air with relatively uniform pressure, temperature and humidity.
What is an air mass?
The imaginary lines that run east to west across the Earth.
What are Lines of Latitude?
It means "pile" in Latin.
What does cumulus mean?
Around June 21st in the Northern Hemisphere.
When is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere?
The polar easterlies, westerlies, and trade winds.
What are the wind currents in the troposphere called?
Arctic, polar and tropical
What are the three types of air masses?
The point at which the Earth is farthest from the sun.
What is aphelion?
The prefix nimbo or the suffix nimbus.
What is added to the cloud name if it is a dark cloud?
There are exactly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness.
How many hours of daylight and darkness are there on the equinoxes?
Winds that occur in a specific area in spite of global wind patterns, caused by temperature differences on the surface of earth.
What are local winds?
This air mass forms over land and is very warm.
What is a continental tropical air mass?
The point at which Earth is closest to the sun.
What is Perihelion?
The type of cloud associated with a thunder storm.
What is a cumulonimbus cloud?
The axial tilt of the earth and where the Earth is in its orbit around the sun determines this.
What determines Earth's seasons?
They bend east because of the difference in speed of the rotation of different parts of the Earth.
What happens to winds as they move from the poles to the equator?
Cold, stationary, warm and occluded
What are the four types of weather fronts?
The way in which the rotation of the Earth bends the path of wind, sea currents and objects that fly through different latitudes.
What is the Coriolis effect?
The type of clouds that have a feathery appearance but also form flat layers.
What are cirrostratus clouds?
When the Earth is at perihelion in its orbit.
When in Earth's orbit is it winter in the Northern Hemisphere or summer in the the Southern Hemisphere.
Changing air temperature and the Coriolis effect.
What two things cause the global wind patterns?
This occurs when two air masses traveling in the same direction collide.
What is an occluded front?