Читать книгу Weather For Dummies - John D. Cox - Страница 40

IN THIS CHAPTER

Watching air masses amass and their fronts do battle

Seeing how the Sun’s energy powers the weather

Sorting out the effects of orbit and tilt and rotation

Composing an atmosphere

If there is a personality that describes the atmosphere, the blanket of air where all the weather takes place, you might think of it as flighty or fickle. Do you know people who change their minds a lot? Who often seem to be repeating the ideas of the last person they were with? That’s the atmosphere all over. (You want to scream sometimes: “Make up your mind!” Does it help?)

At the Go Figure Academy of Sciences, weather experts describe this maddening characteristic in polite, five-dollar terms like instability and turbulence and chaos. Frankly, the word unbalanced comes to mind, if you get my drift.

As any weather forecaster can tell you, the atmosphere is unreliable — here today, gone tomorrow, as the saying goes, blowing hot and cold. You think you know it when you go to bed at night, and then, poof! — as soon as the Sun comes up, there’s a completely different character. This chapter is all about the things that make the atmosphere and its weather the way it is — so changeable.