weather vocab

Question 1

Humidity

Answer 1

Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air. If there is a lot of water vapor in the air, the humidity will be high. The higher the humidity, the wetter it feels outside. On the weather reports, humidity is usually explained as relative humidity.

Question 2

Cumulus Cloud

Answer 2

Cumulus clouds are puffy clouds that sometimes look like pieces of floating cotton. The base of each cloud is often flat and may be only 1000 meters (3300 feet) above the ground. The top of the cloud has rounded towers.

Question 3

Stratus Cloud

Answer 3

Stratus clouds are low-level layers with a fairly uniform grey or white colour. Often the scene of dull, overcast days in its ‘nebulosus’ form, they can persist for long periods of time. They are the lowest-lying cloud type and sometimes appear at the surface in the form of mist or fog.

Question 4

Cirrus Cloud

Answer 4

Cirrus clouds are short, detached, hair-like clouds found at high altitudes. These delicate clouds are wispy, with a silky sheen, or look like tufts of hair. In the daytime, they are whiter than any other cloud in the sky. While the Sun is setting or rising, they may take on the colours of the sunset.

Question 5

Cumulonimbus Cloud

Answer 5

Cumulonimbus is a dense, towering vertical cloud, forming from water vapor carried by powerful upward air currents. If observed during a storm, these clouds may be referred to as thunderheads. Cumulonimbus can form alone, in clusters, or along cold front squall lines.

Question 6

Condensation

Answer 6

Condensation is the change of the state of matter from the gas phase into the liquid phase, and is the reverse of vaporization. The word most often refers to the water cycle

Question 7

Evaporation

Answer 7

Evaporation is a type of vaporization that occurs on the surface of a liquid as it changes into the gas phase. The surrounding gas must not be saturated with the evaporating substance. When the molecules of the liquid collide, they transfer energy to each other based on how they collide with each other.

Question 8

Precipitation

Answer 8

In meteorology, precipitation is any product of the condensation of atmospheric water vapor that falls under gravitational pull from clouds. The main forms of precipitation include drizzling, rain, sleet, snow, ice pellets, graupel and hail.

Question 9

Runoff

Answer 9

Surface runoff is the flow of water occurring on the ground surface when excess rainwater, stormwater, meltwater, or other sources, can no longer sufficiently rapidly infiltrate in the soil.

Question 10

Rain

Answer 10

moisture condensed from the atmosphere that falls visibly in separate drops.

Question 11

Sleet

Answer 11

a form of precipitation consisting of ice pellets, often mixed with rain or snow.

Question 12

Snow

Answer 12

atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals and falling in light white flakes or lying on the ground as a white layer.

Question 13

Hail

Answer 13

pellets of frozen rain which fall in showers from cumulonimbus clouds.

Question 14

Polar – Maritime Airmass

Answer 14

Polar maritime is the most common air mass to affect the British Isles. This air mass starts very cold and dry but during its long passage over the relatively warm waters of the North Atlantic its temperature rises rapidly and it becomes unstable to a great depth.

Question 15

Tropical – Maritime Airmass

Answer 15

Tropical maritime air is warm and moist in its lowest layers and, although unstable over its source region, during its passage over cooler waters becomes stable and the air becomes saturated.

Question 16

Polar – Continental Airmass

Answer 16

This air mass has its origins over the snow fields of Eastern Europe and Russia and is only considered a winter (November to April) phenomena. During the summer with the land mass considerably warmer, this air mass would be classed as a tropical continental.

Question 17

Tropical – Continental Airmass

Answer 17

Continental Tropical air masses (cT) are a type of tropical air produced by the subtropical ridge over large areas of land and typically originate from low-latitude deserts such as the Sahara Desert in northern Africa, which is the major source of these air masses.

Question 18

Cold Front

Answer 18

A cold front is the leading edge of a cooler mass of air at ground level that replaces a warmer mass of air and lies within a pronounced surface trough of low pressure. It often forms behind an extratropical cyclone, at the leading edge of its cold air advection pattern—known as the cyclone’s dry “conveyor belt” flow.

Question 19

Warm Front

Answer 19

A warm front is the boundary between a mass of warm air and a retreating mass of cold air. At constant atmospheric pressure, warm air is less dense than cold air, and so it tends to override, rather than displace, the cold air.

Question 20

Thunderstorm

Answer 20

a storm with thunder and lightning and typically also heavy rain or hail.

Question 21

Lightning

Answer 21

Lightning is a giant spark of electricity in the atmosphere between clouds, the air, or the ground. In the early stages of development, air acts as an insulator between the positive and negative charges in the cloud and between the cloud and the ground.

Question 22

Thunder

Answer 22

a loud rumbling or crashing noise heard after a lightning flash due to the expansion of rapidly heated air.

Question 23

Tornado

Answer 23

A tornado is a violently rotating column of air extending from the base of a thunderstorm down to the ground. Tornadoes are capable of completely destroying well-made structures, uprooting trees, and hurling objects through the air like deadly missiles.

Question 24

Hurricane

Answer 24

a storm with a violent wind, in particular a tropical cyclone in the Caribbean.

Question 25

Thermometer

Answer 25

an instrument for measuring and indicating temperature, typically one consisting of a narrow, hermetically sealed glass tube marked with graduations and having at one end a bulb containing mercury or alcohol that expands and contracts in the tube with heating and cooling.

Question 26

Anemometer

Answer 26

an instrument for measuring the speed of the wind, or of any current of gas.