Weather Ch 3 vocab only
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39 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 hurricane | a tropical storm that has winds up to 119km or higher |
| lightning | a sudden spark or energy discharged from parts of a cloud or between the cloud and the ground |
| storm | a violent disturbance in the atmosphere |
| tornado | a rapidly whirling funnel shaped cloud that reaches down from a storm cloud to touch earth's surface |
| evacuate | move away temporarily |
| storm surge | a dome of water that sweeps across the coast where a hurricane lands |
| coriolis effect | when prevailing westerlies push air masses from the northwest to the south west |
| cold fronts | occur when the cold dense air slides underneath warm moist air forcing it to rise |
| warm fronts | form when warm air moves over cold air |
| stationary fronts | form when masses meet and niether has enough energy to move the other |
| tornado watch | means that weather conditions are favorible for the formating of tornadoes |
| tornado warning | means that a tornado has been sighted |
| eye of the hurricane | is an area of sudden calm |
| hurricane watch | that a hurricane landfall strikes in the area within 36 hours |
| hurrican warning | mean that a hurricane will take landfall in area within 24 hours |
| flash flood | is a sudden violent flood that occurs within a few hours or even minutes of a storm |
| flood | occurs when the water capacity of a water drainage system is exceeded |
| flood watch | means that floods are possible |
| flood warning | means that flooding is already occuring |
| meteorologists | scientists who study the cause of weather and try to predict it |
| el nino | a warm water event that occurs in the tropical pacific ocean |
| isobars | lines joining places on a map that have the same air pressure |
| isotherm | lines joining places on a weather map that have the same temperature |
| saffir-simpson scale | a scale that catorgizes hurricane intensity from a hurricane 1 to a hurrican 5 |
| fujiti scale | a scale catorgizes from f0 to f6 |
| what causes a tornado | they form in low, heavy cumulonimbus clouds when warm and cold air masses collide |
| what is thunder | when the lightening molecules crash into each other |
| la nina | cooling water in the equatorial pacific |
| weather map | snapshot of conditions over the local area at given times |
| the national weather sevice | the government office that collects tallies and reports the data in offical forecasts |
| air mass | a huge body of air that has similar temperature, humidity and air pressure |
| tropical air mass | originated in the tropics and has high tempertures, high humidity and low pressures |
| polar air masses | originated over the poles with low humidty and high pressure |
| maritime air masses | originated over oceans, high humidity and variable temperatures and pressure |
| front | the area where air masses meet and do not mix |
| continental air mass | air masses that form over the land in the middle of continents and have low humity and variable temperature and pressure |
| occluded front | when a warm air mass is cut off from the ground and between two cold air masses |
| cyclone | a swirling center of low pressure that spin counter clockwise, called a low |
| anticyclone | high pressure center with dry clear weather called a high and swing clock wise |
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