Weather Instruments
What is a thermometer?
A forecast that predicts conditions for up to 48 hours.
What is a short-range forecast?
The amount of water vapor in the air.
What is humidity?
A front where warm air meets cold air and rises gradually, causing gentle rain.
What is a warm front?
Patterns of weather over years, decades, or centuries.
What is climate?
A device that measure wind speed?
What is an anemometer?
A type of forecasting accurate for only a few hours.
What is nowcasting?
The temperature at which air becomes saturated and dew forms.
What is the dew point?
A front where cold air pushes warm air up quickly, often causing thunderstorms.
What is a cold front?
Current conditions of the atmosphere in a specific place and time.
What is weather?
Uses wet and dry bulbs to determine relative humidity.
What is a psychrometer?
Predicting future weather based on ongoing observations of atmospheric conditions.
What is persistence forecasting?
A line on a weather map showing places of equal atmospheric pressure.
What is an isobar?
A front that does not move because air masses have similar temperatures.
What is a stationary front?
A process where gases absorb and re-emit heat, warming Earth’s surface.
What is the greenhouse effect?
Device that measure atmospheric pressure.
What is a barometer?
A forecast that predicts conditions for 3 to 7 days.
What is a long-range forecast?
The force of the atmosphere on the surface below it.
What is atmospheric pressure?
A front formed when a fast-moving cold front overtakes a warm front.
What is an occluded front?
A gas like carbon dioxide that traps heat in the atmosphere.
What is a greenhouse gas?
This helium-filled device carries technology to collect upper-atmosphere data.
What is a weather balloon?
This type of weather model has high accuracy but only for short-term predictions.
What is high-resolution forecasting?
Compares actual water vapor in the air to the maximum it can hold at a given temperature.
What is relative humidity?
When isobars are close together, this type of weather can be expected.
What are strong winds?
A term meaning “human-caused.”
What is anthropogenic?