Defining Climate
Climate is affected by several factors.
Annual averages and variations
• Climate describes the long term weather patterns of an area.
• Climatic data can indicate the warmest and coldest temperatures in an area.
Normals
• The data used to describe an areas climate are complied from meteorological records, which are continuously gathered at thousands of locations around the world.
• data includes high and low temperatures, amounts of rainfall, and wind speed and direction.
Limitations of normals
•While climate describes the average weather conditions for a region, normal values apply only to the specific place where the meteorological data were collected.
•Most meteorological data are gathered at airports, it only operates in up to date data to work.
Causes of Climate
• Climates vary depending on location, it is warmer in Dallas, Texas than in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
•There are several reasons for such climatic variations, including differences in latitude, topography, closeness of lakes and oceans, availability of moisture, global wind patterns, ocean currents, and air masses.
Latitude
• Different parts of the Earth receive different amounts of radiation.
• The Earth's tilt affects
Topographic effects
- Water heats and cools faster than the land making large bodies of water effect the climate more in coastal areas.
- mountains are usually cooler in the winter and warmer in the summer because it cools and heats faster than the water and land.
Air Masses
- Two of the main causes of weather are the movement and interaction of air masses.
- Recall that air masses have distinct regions of origin, caused primarily by differences in the amount of solar radiation.