Temperature
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Temperature is always changes. It is normally cooler in the morning than it is in the afternoon. We have colder weather in Winter than Summer. A meteorologist uses a thermometer to measure the temperature.
The word “thermometer” really means “heat measure,” so that means that the temperature is really a measure of how much heat there is in the air. Less heat means colder weather, and more heat means hotter weather!
Temperature is reported in degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Celsius. Those two temperature scales are just different ways to show how warm or cold the air is. In the United States, we usually use the Fahrenheit scale. If the temperature is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, you would write it like this: 32º F |
Wind
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Wind is air that moves, but sometimes it moves fast. Other times it moves slowly. An anemometer is the tool you can use to measure the wind’s speed and tell which direction it comes from.
When the anemometer measures the wind, it shows the direction that it comes from and how fast it is moving. The wind is named for the direction it comes from.
Wind is very important because it causes large air masses to move around. A north wind usually brings Alabama cool, dry weather. A south wind will bring us warmer, more humid weather. A west or southwest wind usually means dry, warm weather. And lastly, when the wind is from the east, it is usually going to be cool and wet in Alabama! |
Precipitation
Precipitation is anything made of water that falls from the sky! Rain is wet, snow is i
ce, and hail is a chunk of hard ice that falls from strong thunderstorms. Precipitation can be measured in a lot of ways, but the most common is with a rain gage.
Rain gages can be a tube with a ruler on the side like this one:
Or the more accurate ones have moving parts on the inside that measure precipitation with a tiny bucket:
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Keep Up With Your Weather
If you have some weather tools like the ones above, you can make a weather chart every day and keep a record of the weather at your house or school!
It’s easy. All you have to do is print the ABC 33/40 Weather Chart, and remember to write down what the weather was like every day!
The Big Tools
There are a lot of tools that you can use at home, but some are so big and expensive that there are only a few of them around. Satellites and radars are two of the biggest!
Satellites
Satellites give us a big picture of what the weather is doing over a large area. They look at clouds moving over the land and sea, and give us a look at weather patterns. Check out the Satellites page for more!
Radar
Since satellites show us clouds, we need another tool to see underneath them. And since we are on the ground and can only see around 10 miles in any direction on a clear day, we need something to let us see rain or snow at long distances. Radar does that for us. A radar is able to detect precipitation using special energy waves. Here’s a neat animation showing how radar works (courtesy UCAR):
Radars like ABC 33/40’s Live Pinpoint Doppler Radar scan the sky every day looking for precipitation. With a tool like this, we can see if it is raining up to 150 miles away from Birmingham!That is useful when we are tracking storms in severe weather. You can watch some of our severe weather coverage in the ABC 33/40 Video Vault: Click here for videos.
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