Possible short answer questions for Weather End of Unit Assessment

1. Why is the air at the top of a tall mountain hard to breathe?
2. What changes in pressure would expect to see if you carried an aneroid barometer from sea level down a mine shaft?  Up a mountain?  Why would these changes occur?
3. What is the main characteristic used to separate the atmosphere into layers?  What happens to this characteristic as you go up through the atmosphere?
4. List the three main forms of radiation from the sun received by the earth.  How are they alike?  How are they different?
5. Name and describe three ways heat can be transferred.
6. How does unequal heating of the Earth’s surface cause winds?
7. Describe how a standard thermometer works.  What are the two most common temperature scales?  How are the determined?
8. Describe what to the earliest atmosphere was composed of, where it came from  and what happened to it.
9. We say that the thermosphere is about 1800 degrees C, yet a standard thermometer would read far below 0 degrees C.  How can this be true?
 Describe why temperature increases as you go up in the stratosphere.
 What is relative humidity?
What does the symbol “mT” stand for?  Where does it form?  What would air here be like?
Why is the wet bulb depression (difference between the wet bulb temperature and the dry bulb temperature) lower when there is a lot of  humidity  than when there is little humidity.
 Describe how and why a cloud forms.
If there is a stable  mP air mass over top of you and a cP air mass moves into the area, what kind of front would there be?  Is there a possibility of rain?  Why?