Children who live in places where the winters get cold love to see frost on the windows. Some of the patterns are quite beautiful and look like intricate designs on trees or leaves. For this frost to form on the windowpanes-as well as on trees and grass -cert...

One of the most beautiful objects formed by nature is a snowflake. It would take most of us a long time to "design" a shape as beautiful as a single snowflake. Yet in an ordinary snowstorm, billions upon billions of snowflakes fall to the earth-and no two ar...

You would imagine that dew is a very simple phenomenon of nature, easily understood and explained. Yet strangely enough, exactly what dew is has long been misunderstood, and whole books have been written on the subject!

Since the days of Aristotle until about 2...

When you leave a piece of iron for a few days in a place where it's damp or wet, a covering of rust forms over it just as if someone had come along and painted that reddish color on it.

What is rust? Why does it form on iron and steel? Rust is iron ...

A fog is a cloud in contact with the ground. There is no basic difference between a fog and a cloud floating high in the atmosphere. When a cloud is near or on the surface of the earth or sea, it is simply called "fog."

The commonest fogs are those seen at nigh...

If you put a pitcher of ice water on a table and let it stand a while, what happens? Moisture gathers on the outside of the pitcher. Where does this moisture come from? It comes from the air.

The fact is there is always moisture in the air in the form of w...

There are two ways of looking at the wind and where it comes from. One is in terms of your immediate neighborhood, and one is in terms of the world and the big winds that blow over it.

Differences in pressure may exist in a small region around...

Nowadays, the word "jet" is very much in the news, and you might im­agine that the "jet stream" has something to do with jet planes. This isn't the case at all!

The jet stream is part of the system of winds that surround the earth, so let's start with the su...

Since earliest times, man has been curious about the changing of the seasons. Why is it warm in summer and cold in winter? Why do the days gradually grow longer in the spring? Why are the nights so long in winter?

We all know the earth r...

All the conditions of the atmosphere are "weather." Whether it's hot or cold, dry or wet, sunny or cloudy, windy or still, it's "weather." The weather is changeable from day to day, and the total effect during a year is called "the climate."

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