Question: What is weather?
How the outside air feels and looks
Weather affects how we dress and the activities in which we participate.
Ex. farmers keep track of the weather to know when to plant and harvest their crops.
Question: How can weather be described?
Weather can sometimes be described in terms of cloudiness, or amount of clouds in the sky. Cloudiness is observed directly and described with phrases like “partly cloudy,” “mostly cloudy,” and “overcast.”
Weather consists of all the conditions surrounding the Earth.
These conditions change from day to day and from place to place.
Factors that determine weather conditions
(how hot or cold)
(moving air)
in the Sky
(the form of water that falls from the clouds, such as rain, sleet, snow, hail, and ice)
Question: What are the different types of precipitation?
| Rain | Sleet | Snow | Hail | Ice |
Question: What causes precipitation?
The air around Earth contains water. Water enters the air from the oceans. When the sun heats the water in the oceans and lakes, it changes from a liquid to water vapor. This process is called evaporation.
Air can hold more vapor when it is warm than when it is cool. As the air cools, some of the vapor changes into droplets of water. This changing process is called condensation. Condensation produces clouds.
When enough vapor condenses, tiny water droplets join together to make larger, heavier drops that fall to the Earth as precipitation. Precipitation occurs when water, previously evaporated, condenses out of the air and changes states from gas to liquid (rain), or to solid (snow and sleet).
To learn more about
the Water Cycle,
click here! and here!Learn the Water Cycle Song!
Read about Drippy the Raindrop.
Test your knowledge of the Water Cycle!
Take a Water Cycle Quiz!
graphic from http://www.kidzone.ws/water/
Question: What are the specific cloud types?
To find out the answer, visit the Cloud page!
Question: What are some types of severe weather?
Droughts
a lack of rain for a long period of time
~ this can ruin crops and cause hardship for other plants and animals
Floods
too much rain - a lot of rain falls in a short period of time and causes lakes, rivers, and streams to overflow
Storms
can make travel dangerous and cause death and property damage.
There are four types of storms.
Thunderstorm
brief, intense storms that affect a small area
huge, rotating storms formed over the ocean that produce strong winds, heavy rain, and large, powerful waves
whirling, violent windstorms accompanied by a funnel cloud that travels a narrow path over land
Winter Storms
There are two types of winter storms:
where rain freezes at the Earth’s surface, coating everything with ice
To
learn more about the different types of severe weather,
visit The
Disaster Area!