Climate Classification Systems Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The first two are correct. The third is impossible, since a water balance needs both the supply and the demand and precipitation is the supply. Both halves of the balance are needed. Temperature and daylength give the demand.

Answer: D

Strahler's air mass classification is the standard example, grouping climates by the air masses that dominate them. It explains why a climate is as it is rather than merely describing it. Air masses are the usual basis.

Answer: A

Correct answer: an air mass based classification

An air mass classification is genetic: it groups climates by the circulation and the air masses that produce them, explaining why a place has the climate it has. Koppen, Thornthwaite and Trewartha are all empirical, deriving their classes from measured temperature, rainfall or water balance without reference to cause.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

A boundary on a climate map is a line drawn where a numerical threshold happens to be crossed, and the climate itself changes gradually across a wide transitional zone. The line also moves as the averaging period changes, so a boundary mapped from one thirty-year normal will not lie where one mapped from the next does - which is how shifting climate zones are detected in the first place.

Answer: C

Both are true and the reason gives the caution, and it applies with particular force where a boundary shifts from decade to decade as the climate itself changes. Variation across the line is gradual. Nothing changes abruptly at the boundary itself.

Answer: D

Correct answer: predicting the weather for the coming week

Climate is the statistics of the atmosphere over decades and weather is its state on a particular day, so no classification of the first can forecast the second. The three genuine purposes are all here: organising data into comprehensible types, allowing distant regions to be compared, and indicating what vegetation or crops a place will support.

Answer: A

Correct answer: correct the extent of the temperate group

Trewartha’s principal complaint was that Koppen’s C group was far too broad, sweeping together climates from the Mediterranean to the humid subtropics to the cool oceanic. His modification narrowed it and introduced a separate subtropical group, using the number of months above 10 degrees as the criterion. The dry group survives, and the system remains empirical.

Answer: B

The first two are correct and are inherent to the exercise. The third is quite wrong, since a classification is a summary and a summary is never a substitute for the record it summarises. Thresholds are chosen, not discovered.

Answer: C

The coldest month lies between minus three and eighteen degrees, which is the temperate criterion. Below minus three it would be continental and above eighteen tropical. The coldest month decides it. Two thresholds bracket the temperate group.

Answer: D

The sequence follows the general circulation, with the dry belt beneath the subtropical highs between the tropical and temperate zones. Continental and polar types follow at higher latitudes. The circulation explains the sequence.