WEATHER AND CLIMATE: AIR MASSES

WEATHER AND CLIMATE: AIR MASSES


Perhaps the best way of starting to look at this is to take the global perspective and then try and apply it to an area of the world that we know best, the United Kingdom.

Air masses around the earth extend for many hundreds of miles/kilometres and up into the atmosphere. They move creating different climatic conditions depending on where you are on the earth. For example we in the UK do not have the same weather as central African countries. Air masses are large bodies of air that are the same temperature and humidity. The type of weather that is produced depends on the land and sea mass that they travel over. The air masses are given names often depending on where they originate and are an indication of the type of weather that they may bring. E.g. a Tropical air mass tends to bring hot humid weather.

Air masses that travel over the sea tend to be moist than those that have travelled over land. The same applies to air masses originating over cold or hot area’s i.e. cold or hotter air.

The diagram below shows the typical air masses that affect the UK. (NOT ATTACHED SEE DIAGRAM ON 'PAGE' OF THE SAME TITLE).
When air masses come together they create a ‘front’, creating clouds and changing the weather. The diagram shows that in the UK we have air coming from all directions with different qualities giving us a great verity of weather types. Good and bad! The air mass is not the only indicator of weather, there are other factors such as speed, land mass etc. and those elements are perhaps for another day.

There are other types of air masses over the globe but for this blog we have considered that air masses are global large blocks of air that when they collide create weather systems. There are mainly 4 affecting the UK. In future blogs I will look at other climate features, to tempt those taste buds: hurricanes and mid latitude depressions to name but 2.


For this blog I have used various search engines and I have found the information on the BBC site really helpful but many others as well. I am finding that I need to develop skills on down loading information. I do not know how to insert a picture in the correct location of the text. Any help would be gratefully received.