Page 275 - Geosystems An Introduction to Physical Geography 4th Canadian Edition

Chapter 8 Weather 239
lightning (p. 223)
thunder (p. 223)
hail (p. 223)
straight-line winds (p. 224) downbursts (p. 224) microbursts (p. 224) plough winds (p. 224) derecho (p. 225)
tornado (p. 225) tropical cyclone (p. 226) hurricane (p. 226) typhoon (p. 226) landfall (p. 228)
storm surge (p. 229)
13. What constitutes a thunderstorm? What type of cloud is involved? What type of air mass would you expect in an area of thunderstorms in North America?
14. Lightning and thunder are powerful phenomena in nature. Briefly describe how they develop.
15. Describe the formation process of a mesocyclone. How is this development associated with that of a tornado?
16. Evaluate the pattern of tornado activity in Canada and the United States. What generalizations can you make about the distribution and timing of tornadoes? Do you perceive a trend in tornado occurrences in North America? Explain.
17. What are the different classifications for tropical cyclones? List the various names used worldwide for hurricanes. Have any hurricanes ever occurred in the south Atlantic?
18. Why have damage figures associated with hurricanes increased even though loss of life has decreased over the past 30 years?
19. How did the effects of Hurricane Katrina in part relate to engineering and flood control structures in New Orleans?
20. Explain several differences between Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. How is present climate change affecting hurricane intensity and damage costs?
Looking for additional review and test prep materials? Visit the Study Area in MasteringGeographyTM to enhance your geographic literacy, spatial reasoning skills, and understanding of this chapter’s content by accessing a variety of resources, including interactive maps, geoscience animations, satellite loops, author notebooks, videos, rSS feeds, web links, self-study quizzes, and an eText version of Geosystems.
visualanalysis 8 Wildfire, clouds, climatic regions, and climate change
The King Fire in the central Sierra Nevada
of California scorched more than 98,000 acres in September and October 2014, and formed
a pyrocumulus cloud in which the rising thermal plume is fed by heat from the fire.
3. What characteristics of the Mediterranean cli- mate make it prone to the occurrence of wildfire?
4. given what you have learned about the current state of global temperatures, heat waves, and drought in the first two parts of this textbook, would you expect wildfire occurrence and se- verity to be increasing, decreasing, or remain- ing the same as climate changes? See Chapters 19 and 20 for more discussion of wildfire as it relates to ecological processes, climate regions, and climate change.
1. 2.
What two types of clouds do you see in the photo? Describe the processes that formed each type.
Speculate on the sources of water vapour for condensation processes that led to these clouds forming.
[Bobbé Christopherson.]