Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my. Hello there. You're listening to The Science of Everything podcast, episode 110,

Weather Part 2. I'm your host, James Fodor. So in this second in our two-part series on

the weather, we're going to be continuing from where we left off last time, which was talking

about air masses, and begin by talking about fronts, which then allow us to understand

the formation of storms and other weather phenomena in mid-latitude.

So we'll talk about mid-latitude cyclones and then move towards the more well-known tropical cyclones,

and finish up by talking about thunderstorms and also tornadoes.

The recommended pre-listening for this episode is, not surprisingly, the previous part, episode

109, weather part 1.

And I'll be using concepts introduced in that, so make sure you've given that a listen

before listening to this one in order for everything to make sense.

So, let's jump straight in then and start talking about weather fronts. Remember from the previous

episode where we talked about air masses, an air mass being a large region of air that has

similar properties. So particularly we're talking about properties of whether it's moist or dry.

That is whether it is relatively saturated with moisture or relatively unsaturated, and also temperature,

so whether it's basically a warm or cool, warmer air coming from closer to the equator and cooler

air from the polar regions. Now, what happens when different air masses come together? Well,

in that case, you have the formation of what is called a front. The language of

fronts actually comes from the First World War, where you had armies from the central powers and

the allies lined up along big fronts, which you could mark with lines on the map. And that's

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