What are surface maps?
Surface maps show us what type of weather is occurring where we live and work. You will sometimes find fronts drawn on surface maps, including cold, warm, stationary, and occluded fronts. There are two common sets of conventions for showing fronts in color on weather maps: • Cold fronts as lines with blue barbs, warm fronts as lines with red scallops, stationary fronts as lines with alternating blue barbs and red scallops on opposite sides of the line, and occluded fronts as the same thing except with alternating barbs on the same side of the line; or • Cold fronts simply as blue lines, warm fronts as red lines, stationary fronts as alternating blue-red lines, and occluded fronts as pink lines.
