What Makes The Weather?

Weather is what the air or atmosphere is like at anytime. No matter what the air is – Cold, Cool, Calm, Hot, Warm, Breezy, Windy, Dry, Moist or Wet – that us weather. It may be any combination of different amounts of heat, moisture, and motion in the air. And it changes from hour to hour, day to day, season to season, and even from year to year.

The daily changes are caused by storms and fair weather moving over the Earth. The seasonal changes are due to the turning of the Earth around the Sun, However, why weather changes from year to year us still not known completely.

The most important cause of weather is the heating and cooling of the air. Heat causes the winds as well as the different ways in which water vapour appears in the atmosphere.

Humidity, the amount of water vapour in the air, combined with temperature, causes many weather conditions. Clouds are a kind of water condition, and they are formed when water vapour condenses high above the ground.

When the cloud droplets grow larger and become too heavy to be held up by the air currents, they fall to the ground and we have the weather known as rain. If the raindrops fall through a layer of air which is below freezing, the drops freeze and our weather is snow.

One of the ways the weather forecaster studies the weather is to look at the fronts that exist. Fronts are boundary lines between the cold air moving southwards from the north, and the warm air moving from the tropics. Most of the severe storms which cause rain, snow and other bad weather are in some way related to these fronts.