Tropical heat generates unstable air in this area, and air masses become extremely dry due to the loss of moisture during the process of tropical ascent. Another significant determinant of tropical desert climate is the presence of subtropical high pressure throughout the year; this involves dry and hot descending air cells named Hadley cells.
This contains 9 lessons aimed at GCSE and/ or Year 9. It includes ecosystem basics, reasons for variations in climate in the tropics, rainforest plant & animal adaptations, tropical desert plant & animal adaptations, coral reefs, mangroves and a case study on deforestation and restoration of tropical rainforests in Thailand.
The climate is very dry with less than 250 mm of rainfall a year. Hot deserts have two distinct seasons: summer , when the temperature ranges between 35-40°C, and winter , when the temperature ranges between 20-30°C.
Sep 04, 2013 · Once the air passes over the mountain range, it moves down the other side, warms, and dries out. This dry air produces a rain shadow. Land in a rain shadow is typically very dry and receives much less precipitation and cloud, creating desert conditions on the leeward side of the range cover.
Why It Doesn't Rain Much in the Sonoran Desert. This area's climate is, in a word, dry. Ringed by mountains that keep the rain away for much of the year, the Sonoran Desert quietly bakes. Moist air moving east from the Pacific Ocean is forced to rise over the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, cooling as it rises.
Air at the equator rises and cools - condensation then forms rain. The air then moves north and south until it gets to about 30° north and south of the equator, where it sinks. This air is dry and no condensation can form, so there is no rain.
But what makes it so hot in a desert? Deserts occur where there is a lack of moisture and thus an abundance of sunlight. With the relative lack in moisture, there is less evaporation. There are also less clouds to reflect the sunlight away.
Rainforest and deserts are wet and dry due to the cycle of the air. ... This warm, dry air can hold a lot of water, so the air starts to suck up what little water is around. At 30 to 50 degrees north and south of the equator, this falling air makes dry air drier. It also turns the land below it into a desert.Jul 24, 2013
Deserts and steppes comprise the regions that are characterized by dry climates. These are arid and semiarid areas that have three main characteristics: very low precipitation, high evaporation rates that typically exceed precipitation and wide temperature swings both daily and seasonally.Mar 13, 2018
Hot-Dry. A hot-dry climate is generally defined as a region that receives less than 20 in. (50 cm) of annual precipitation and where the monthly average outdoor temperature remains above 45°F (7°C) throughout the year.
In dry climates, summers are hot to very hot and there's hardly any rain that falls at all. Winter days can be cool or warm, and winter nights can be very cold. The air is dry, there are hardly any clouds; the sun is very powerful and you'll certainly get a massive glare in your eyes.Nov 24, 2021
The deserts are very dry land areas that can be hot or cold and experience very less rainfall. On the other hand, rainforests receive an enormous amount of rain....Rainforest Plants:Desert PlantsRainforest PlantsThey do not experience much rain.They encounter constant rain up to 180 inches a year.7 more rows
Tropical rainforest covers the area of tropic of capricorn and tropic of cancer and tends to be warm and wet. And desert are on the other hand hot & dry and have little heavy annual rainfall...Oct 12, 2017
The desert has very few organisms, so it has low biodiversity. Some parts of the desert may have no organisms, and therefore zero biodiversity. In contrast, the rainforest has the highest biodiversity of any biome on Earth.Dec 20, 2021
In hot and dry deserts, also known as arid deserts, the temperatures are warm and dry year-round. Some famous arid deserts include the Sahara Desert that covers much of the African continent and the Mojave Desert located in the southwest of the United States. Semi-arid deserts are a bit cooler than hot and dry deserts.Mar 2, 2020
As the name suggests, the dry season is characterised by dry weather (or drier than the wet season). It occurs between May and September in the southern hemisphere. During this time of the year, the sun is located over the northern hemisphere, so the southern hemisphere receives less heat and starts to cool down.Dec 24, 2018
The reason? It's all about the jet stream. In the summer, cold air retreats far to the north, and the jet stream goes north with it. The jet stream is a very fast moving river of air in the atmosphere, and divides cold air and warm air.Jul 20, 2020
The Atacama Desert, Chile: the Driest Desert on Earth – Five Reasons Why. As a definition, a desert is a hot area of land that gets very little rain — not more than 200mm a year, where temperatures during the daytime can get as high as 55°C. At night, deserts cool down, sometimes even below 0°C. Most deserts lie between 15° and 35° north ...
Most deserts lie between 15° and 35° north and south of the equator. They were created by air that rises over the equator and comes down over the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. All over the world, around 20% of the deserts lie in these regions.
On this side of the mountains, called the windward side, precipitation falls in the form of rain or snow. The windward side of a mountain range is moist and lush because of this precipitation.
Also, we have to consider that the Atacama Desert is located over high altitudes, above 2,500 metres above sea level. This fact contributes to low dryng temperatures and very low humidity in the air (about 10%). the rain shadow effect.
This is a dry region of land on the side of a mountain range that is protected from the prevailing winds; those that occur most of the time in a particular location on the Earth. These protected sides, are also called the leeward side or the down-wind side. Prevailing winds carry air toward the mountain range.
Yuma, Arizona, for example, is one of the driest places on earth, averaging about 3H inches (89 mm) a year. Yet deluges in the past have dumped over four inches (100 mm) in a single day.
The effects of the El Ni�o and La Ni�a on global climate are, in part, mirror images of each other, and drought is a common occurrence in the Sonoran Desert region during a La Ni�a event.
August, September and December are the region�s wettest months; May and June are the driest. While there are local variations depending on elevation and proximity to mountains, this pattern basically holds for the entire area. Rainfall here is infrequent and undependable.
Flood Damage along Tucson's Rillito River, October 1983. These large storms begin out at sea, and, as they churn over Baja California, the storms pick up additional energy from the warm waters of the upper Gulf of California. They reach the Sonoran Desert region with renewed energy.
This phenomenon, the rain shadow effect, describes such aridity on the inland side of coastal mountains.
The word monsoon refers to a system of winds that changes seasonally, bringing wet and dry periods to a region. In the Sonoran Desert, the summer monsoon consists of winds from the sea flowing inland to fill the partial vacuum created by rising continental air warmed by the summer sun. These winds bring moisture. The belt of westerlies shifts north in the summertime so that the Pacific high sits around 40� latitude, allowing moist air from the Pacific off of Baja California to move into the region.
The Spanish word chubasco is frequently used by Sonoran Desert dwellers to refer to these tropical storms. ("Chubasco"is more generally defined as any extremely violent storm.) Although infrequent, these storms are memorable. Consider, for example, some statistics from the flood of 1983.
The plume came from small dust particles that were picked up from the Sahara Desert in Africa and transported thousands of miles by the wind.
The dust itself is made up of the “skeletons” of diatoms, microorganisms that trace their origin back to when the Bodélé depression was full of water. These diatoms are picked up by winds that are naturally accelerated through a gap in the mountains upwind of the depression.
Shutterstock. Northern Africa is one of the driest regions on Earth, home to the Sahara desert, the largest hot desert in the world. This extremely dry region, where it's not uncommon to have no rain for over a year in some places was once a tropical humid area.
But first, let's step back to the time when northern Africa was humid and tropical 5,500 years ago. This time, spanning between 11,500 and 5,500 years ago is known as the African Humid Period where, you guessed it, northern Africa was a very pleasant place to live.
Some areas, like parts of the Amazon Basin in South America, get almost 3 meters (9 feet) of rain per year. Other areas in the tropics have a drier climate.
tropics. The tropics are regions of the Earth that lie roughly in the middle of the globe. The tropics between the latitude lines of the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The tropics include the Equator and parts of North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. The tropics account for 36 percent ...
Tropic of Capricorn. Noun. line of latitude 23.5 degrees south of the Equator. tropics. Plural Noun. region generally located between the Tropic of Cancer (23 1/2 degrees north of the Equator) and the Tropic of Capricorn (23 1/2 degrees south of the Equator). trunk.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Elevation can affect the climate of a tropical region. Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, with an elevation of 5,895 meters (19,340 feet), is a tropical mountain cold enough to support glaciers.
The baobab tree thrives in the arid tropics of Africa, for instance. The baobab stores water in its huge trunk. On the other extreme is the rainy island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka gets enough precipitation to support 250 species of frogs.