Key Questions at the beginning of the chapter on p. 205. Several of these questions are pivotal with regard to understanding why different areas on Earth experience different climate conditions. First, remind yourself off the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is the short-term patterns (from day-to-day) of temperature, moisture, pressure (and the resultant wind patterns that pressure differences cause) in the atmosphere Climate is predicated on the same atmospheric conditions, but over long period of time, i.e. over a season such as summer or winter, and seasonally repetitive from year to year, from decade to decade, and in many places, from century to century.
With regard to understanding why and how climate differs from one region of the earth to another, it will be helpful for you to think about and then answer the following questions as you ready/study Ch. 8. So, for this assignment, please provide your responses to the following questions from KeyQuestions:
- What information do you need to classify the climate of a location?
- Why are the tropics so warm and rainy all year?
- Why do the Earth’s desert regions form where they do?
- Why do some midlatitude locations have mild winters (like we experience here in coastal Southern California), whereas other midlatitude locations have severe, cold winters, e.g. central United States?
- Why are the Earth’s high latitude polar regions so cold and so dry?
