How can weather maps be used to predict weather?
This is a complicated question to answer simply. The main point though is that the atmosphere is always moving. This happens for a lot of reasons, but one obvious one is that as the earth rotates the sun warms the air underneath it causing it to expand. The atmosphere tends to organise itself into bands that don’t intermix most of the time. So, the cold air in the arctic isn’t usually rushing down to the equator and vice versa (although that does happen sometimes). Where bands of warm and colder air meet there is often turbulence at the boundaries caused by the movement I just spoke of. That turbulence can turn into the air equivalent of whirlpools. Cold air forces warm air upwards where it cools and water in it condenses, causing rain. You can see these whirlpools if you take lots of measures of the air pressure and plot them on a weather map and join up points of equal pressure using lines called “isobars”. The whirls are called “depressions”. You can also get whirlpools of high pres
