1. Why is the water level of the Great Lakes dropping, and how is this change a problem?

2. What is the hydrologic cycle? Describe how water moves through it.

3. Explain how the hydrologic cycle is “solar powered.”

4. In what three states does water occur? What are hydrogen bonds and how do they influence the state of water?

5. What must be added or removed from water to break or form hydrogen bonds?

6. What does it mean that water vapor has the highest internal energy state of water’s states? What is the source of that energy?

7. Why is evaporation a cooling process? What is being cooled?

8. Why is condensation a warming process? What is being warmed?

9. What is atmospheric saturation? What causes air to become saturated?

10. What is the heat-index temperature? How does humidity make the air feel warmer?

11. Compare specific humidity, vapor pressure, and the dew point in terms of what units each measure uses and how each can be increased or decreased.

12. What is saturation vapor pressure? How can it be increased or decreased?

13. What is relative humidity? How can it be increased or decreased?

14. Does a high relative humidity always mean that the air has a high water vapor content? Explain.

15. What are adiabatic temperature changes and what causes them? Compare them with temperature changes caused by the environmental lapse rate.

16. Compare an unstable air parcel with a stable air parcel. What determines their stability?

17. Compare the dry adiabatic rate of cooling with the moist adiabatic rate. Why does adiabatic cooling occur at two different rates? Explain why the moist rate of cooling is less than the dry rate.

18. What is the lifting condensation level? Where is it, and what forms there?

19. Compare the windward and leeward sides of mountain ranges in terms of adiabatic temperature changes and precipitation amounts. What is a rain shadow? Why does a rain shadow form?

20. What are the four major ways air is lifted and cooled adiabatically to the dew point? Describe how each works.

21. Where, geographically, does convergent uplift mainly take place?

22. What are clouds composed of? Give the four major cloud categories.

23. Which cloud type creates a thickly overcast sky with no precipitation?

24. Which clouds are composed of ice crystals? Why are they composed of ice?

25. What are jet contrails? What forms them, and where do they form?

26. Which types of clouds bring precipitation? Which types bring severe weather?

27. How do radiation fog and advection fog form? Which is more dangerous and why?

28. What are condensation nuclei and ice nuclei? For what processes are each required?

29. Compare and contrast how rain and snow form through the collision-and-coalescence and ice-crystal processes.

30. How are warm clouds, cold clouds, and mixed clouds defined? Which precipitation-forming processes occur in each?

31. What instruments are used to measure rain and snow?

32. Compare the temperature profile in the atmosphere necessary to form rain, snow, sleet, and freezing rain.

33. Which type of cloud produces hail? Explain how hail forms in this cloud.

34. What is the size of the largest hailstone ever found, and where did it fall?

35. Why are clouds important to understanding how climate will change in the future?

36. How does temperature change cloudiness? How does cloudiness change temperature?

37. What is cloud greenhouse forcing? What overall effect does it have on the temperature of the lower atmosphere?

38. What is a negative feedback? Why is it a stabilizing force?

39. What is a positive feedback? Why is it a destabilizing force?

40. What is a cloud negative feedback? How does it relate to the term “negative forcing”?

41. What is a cloud positive feedback? How does it relate to the term “positive forcing”?

42. Currently, is the global cloud cover causing net positive forcing or net negative forcing?