weather vocab Flashcards
Humidity
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.
Cumulus Cloud
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.
Stratus Cloud
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.
Cirrus Cloud
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.
Cumulonimbus Cloud
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.
Condensation
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
Evaporation
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.
Precipitation
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.
Runoff
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.
Rain
moisture condensed from the atmosphere that falls visibly in separate drops.
Sleet
a form of precipitation consisting of ice pellets, often mixed with rain or snow.
Snow
atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals and falling in light white flakes or lying on the ground as a white layer.
Hail
pellets of frozen rain which fall in showers from cumulonimbus clouds.
Polar – Maritime Airmass
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.
Tropical – Maritime Airmass
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.
