The weather of our planet
The weather of our planet is the state of the lower layer of the atmosphere in a certain area at a specific time or for a long time (hour, day, decade, month).
The weather changes very often. It can be warm, cold, rainy, windy… This happens because the sun’s rays warm the planet unevenly. In some places the sky is often cloudy, in others it is almost always clear and sunny. However, it is not only about sunlight. Weather is the state of the atmosphere. This means that all the weather on the planet is made by cyclones and anticyclones.
The Earth rotates on its axis, and its atmosphere lags behind this rotation. Therefore, giant vortices appear in the atmosphere, which determine the weather over entire continents – cyclones and anticyclones. Inside a cyclone, the pressure is lower than normal, so the wind blows toward its center, drawing in moist air and water vapor from nearby oceans. Cyclones bring with them bad weather: showers, thunderstorms, storms.
A cyclone rotates counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere, while an anticyclone rotates in the opposite direction.
Inside the anticyclone, the wind blows from the center to the edges. Therefore, anticyclones bring hot, dry weather in summer, and in winter – a thaw with fogs.
Cyclones and anticyclones move slowly, their speed does not exceed 30 km/h. And they like to stay in one place for a long time – then we have weeks of rain or, on the contrary, sunny weather.
Meteorologists
Meteorologists are experts who study the weather. They work at meteorological stations with a complex of devices and instruments that measure atmospheric pressure, wind strength and direction, temperature, cloud cover, and the amount of precipitation in the form of snow, rain, and hail.
And then, on the basis of the received data, meteorologists draw up special weather maps and weather forecasts. Artificial satellites of the Earth greatly help modern meteorologists in their work. Photographs of air masses taken by them allow predicting rains and storms.
Air cannot be seen, but its movement – wind – can be felt. Warm air, heated during the day, rises from the surface of the earth, and cold air, which has cooled in the upper part of the troposphere, descends. Due to the constant movement of such air flows, wind appears.
A tornado, also called a tornado, is also a wind. Only he is many times stronger than usual. A tornado is a flow of air up to 1.5 km high, twisted into a huge vortex, which rotates and pulls in everything that happens on its way.
A hurricane is a wind of enormous destructive power, moving at a speed of up to 35 m/s. It does not twist into a vortex like a tornado, but simply travels several thousand kilometers, sweeping away everything in its path.
Fog
A fog is a cloud, only not in the sky, but near the surface of the earth. Fog usually forms at night and early in the morning in lowlands and over water bodies. The earth gradually cools at night, and the lower layers of the air also become colder. When cold air meets warm air, fog is formed.
A glacier or glacier is a long-term natural accumulation of ice on the Earth’s surface. It is formed from solid atmospheric precipitation in those areas where more such precipitation falls during the year than melts and evaporates. High in the mountains, the snow does not have time to melt, accumulates and turns into ice.
The atmosphere of our planet Earth
The atmosphere of our planet Earth is like a giant battery in which electricity is constantly accumulating. In part, it occurs due to the friction of air layers and a huge number of tiny dust particles. Radiation from the Sun, which turns neutral atoms in the atmosphere into charged ions, is partly to blame. This electricity constantly circulates from the Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere and back. In the warm season, a lot of atmospheric electricity is collected by storm clouds.
When too much of it accumulates, lightning discharges begin to run between the cloud and the Earth’s surface. Lightning tries to reach the Earth as fast as possible, looking for the highest object. Because of this, you cannot hide under a tree during the rain. When an electric discharge – lightning – flies to the Earth, in a fraction of a second it heats the air in its path so much that something similar to an explosion occurs. Thunder is just the sound of this explosion. The speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound, so we always see the flash of lightning first and then hear the rumble of thunder.
To measure the distance to the place where the thunderstorm rages and the lightning flashes, take a watch and count how many seconds passed from the moment you saw the lightning to the moment the thunder roared. Now divide the number of seconds by three, because the sound of thunder takes 3 seconds to travel 1 km.
Rainbow
A rainbow, also a rainbow, is an atmospheric optical phenomenon, which is one, two or more spectral arcs (or circles, if seen from the air), observed against the background of a cloud, if it is located against the Sun. Sunlight, which appears to us to be white, is actually made up of many different colors. Think of the iridescence of soap bubbles or the reflection of a rainbow on a wall when light falls on the edge of a mirror. An object that can split a beam of light into its component parts is called a prism, and the colored lines formed in this process are called a spectrum. When it rains, small water droplets act as a prism, and a rainbow appears in the sky.