Learn geography
Climate zones, weather patterns, storms, and long-term change—understand how the atmosphere shapes life and landscapes.
Both storms rotate, both can cause destructive winds, and both appear in dramatic weather images. Those similarities hide an important distinction: a hurricane is a whole weather system,…
A mountain summit is often colder than the lowlands, but “higher means colder” has exceptions. To understand the pattern, separate two questions: what happens to air as it…
“River in the sky” is a memorable phrase, but it can suggest the wrong picture: a suspended stream of liquid water. The real feature is moving moisture, and…
A winter forecast can change from snow to sleet to freezing rain even while your outdoor thermometer stays below freezing. The missing information is above your head: falling…
Changing the baseline shifts the anomaly numbers for an unchanged annual temperature series, sometimes reversing their signs, while preserving every year-to-year temperature difference. With one fixed reference mean…
To read a weather station model, check the time, units and legend, then decode the numbers around the station circle and the wind shaft attached to it. In…
To read a wind rose, match each spoke to the direction the wind came from, read its length against the frequency rings, and use the colors to identify…
To read a climograph, identify the months, temperature line, precipitation bars and their separate labeled axes. Read each value on its own scale, then compare the seasonal pattern.…
For horizontal motion, the Coriolis contribution acts to the right of travel in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere. Right and left follow…
Relative humidity is the percentage ratio of actual water vapor pressure to saturation vapor pressure at the air temperature. Dew point is the temperature at which cooling would…
