hey everyone this is the last lecture set for climate classification and once we get through this and finish up all of our climate classification stuff we're going to jump into paleoclimate or historical climate change and then move into modern day climate change but let's get through our last climate classification first last time we went through our mild M latitudes which is where Huntsville and a lot of the Gulf Coast climates are located and now it's time to move on to our severe mid latitude climates I want you to note the big difference here and if you're going to look at Maps remember that the capital D classification is for severe mid latitudes okay but when we look at the classification based on temperature here it's very different from our mile M latitudes because now we have a colder month that is less than freezing so this part right here is going to be what you're going to need to look at to see if we might be in in a severe mid latitude climate if you look at a climate graph and an average monthly temperature is below 32 degre Fahrenheit you cannot be in a tropical climate and you cannot be in a mild mid latitude climate you have to be in either a severe midlatitude or one of the other things that we're going to talk about today okay note that the severe mid latitudes however also have at least one month that gets warmer well maybe not warm to us in Texas but at least warmer than 50° fah so when we think about our declassification or our severe midlatitude climates and you may see this referred to as microthermal though I've highlighted the term that I'm going to use in class severe mid latitudes these are climates as we work away from the equator on the North American continent okay and we look at temperatures that can be very cold during the winter but a warm up during the summer so you think of places like Milwaukee and New York City and these areas around the Great Lakes these are all severe mid latitude climates so they're going to get cold during the winter but they have much warmer Summers than some other areas we're going to talk about that get even colder than these places by the end of this lecture so so when we think about our severe mid latitude climates or you may see these referred to as microthermal though I've highlighted the severe mid latitude term because that's what I'm going to use when you see it again on qu or exams or throughout this lecture set okay these are the places that again are very nice during the summer and the part of the world that I'm from right Chicago land area Southern Wisconsin these various places you'll notice again there's a nice warmup during the summer now this is China but it's similar patterns to what we have in the US because again it's the same climate type and we have temperatures during the winter that we need to make sure we look for to classify it as a severe mid latitude you'll notice right right here is 0° C or freezing and then the corresponding point over here 32° F and so you can see the average monthly temperatures during the winter drop below that point which tells us we are now in a severe mid latitude type climate but again it's not just about the freezing temperatures when we get into these classifications you also need a warm-up here to be classified as a true true severe mid latitude you need warm temperatures above 50 at least sometime during the year but you also need cold temperatures below below 32 on average so thinking about the severe mid latitudes we're getting into higher latitudes meaning we're moving away from the equator a bit okay so we're getting higher within that mid latitude range we're talking about places now getting to 40 50 Dees north latitude if you're in the Northern Hemisphere okay so you get some summer heating when the sun angle goes up and you get a little bit of a surplus but you have larger deficits than other areas that we've talked about so far during the winter months and so summer picture here beautiful around the Great Lakes but you also deal with this certain times of the year and you deal with snow and ice if there's enough precipitation during the winter months and it can persist because you have consistent temperatures below freezing for part of the year when we think about biomes and how they're related to our severe mid- latitudes we're now moving into more of our deciduous vegetation and also our decid ous and mixed Conifer vegetation as well where you get more pine trees and Spruce trees and things like that so this is a picture of a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Wisconsin so these pretty fall Landscapes and you get a well-defined fall with leaves changing color and leaves falling off the trees and some people go to these different areas where there's lots of deciduous forest and they like to go there uh on vacation and things to see the leaves changing and stuff like that we look at our temperate deciduous forest it not only includes places in Minnesota Wisconsin and areas that I'm from it also includes areas further east so this is a picture of a typical landscape around Mammoth Cave Kentucky it is part of the severe mid latitudes and this deciduous forest landscape and if you think about Wisconsin there's a lot of outdoor recreation ass associated with these areas so people in the North Woods of Wisconsin like to hunt and fish and so this is another typical landscape that you would see in these areas outside of the urban core in some of these states and areas now we talked about temperate grasslands before in the south central plains that are part of our mild mid latitudes you also get grasslands that are present in our drier interior regions in our severe mid latitudes as well so as you you get into the areas in southern Minnesota and North and South Dakota these are the kind of Landscapes that you can see and these are the kinds of areas where we grow crops because it's not too hot throughout the year to grow some things but it does warm up enough to be able to have a growing season to grow certain agricultural products so these areas in the severe mid latitudes are part of the Bread Basket of the United States if you've heard that before where we grow a lot of our cereal grains a lot of our corn wheat these types of things and also soybeans so three major Commodities that we grow related to food production and feed for other animals that we also use for food so we look at the areas of where we're at across the us remember when we talk about the severe mid latitudes we're largely talking about areas up in this part of the United States and you'll notice all the areas where we have acreage of Agriculture production all in here where you see the darker green colors this is all related to corn production okay so again right climate right soils and that allows you to grow certain things and so we have the conditions here that are present to do those things so this is our corn production this is a little bit different we're still talking largely about our severe mid latitudes okay but you'll notice that certain things aren't produced I should have drawn that line a little bit further south let's try that again okay but when you look at the heavy duty production here we're talking about wheat production now okay so this is grown in a little bit cooler areas when we think about at least the production within the severe mid latitudes you also see irrigated wheat in these areas down here which goes from severe M latitude into humid sub tropical type climates okay but I want you to note again that the climate is very important for what we can grow in certain areas so if I ask you about the heaviest corn and wheat production a lot of it is related to the severe mid latitude climate and this also relates to the soils that we see as well so these are two different types of soils looking at the profile below the surface and so this mosol is one of the things that is associated with our grasslands and so you can see something we talked about early on where you have all of that rich organic matter and a lot of nutrients you can see the dark color in there and the soil just is generally very good for growing certain agricultural products this alphao here you see on the right is something that you see with less organic material but there's still a lot of mineral content in here and it's still very good for GR growing things okay these are traditionally more of our forest soils but our mocols and our Alphas sols combined form in these climates very well in the severe mid latitudes they also form in other places but there's a lot of alpha Cs and moles around in the Corn Belt and where we have our wheat production in these areas and so this again the climate plus the soils are very good for agriculture as we move further north within our severe mid- latitude climate we start to get into more coniferous trees or our needle based trees right and so you can see that in the background here okay so this is now getting into the TGA type biome and again I've bolded that and put it in red as the term that I want you to relate with some of these areas you'll note in terms of temperatures again because we're further moving further north and now we're in like this 60° North type latitude range in some cases you'll notice there's a lot more time during the year where you're actually below freezing okay sorry I didn't draw that line straight but we're going from 0 degrees over to 32 degrees somewhere in here right if I had drawn that straight line so much of the year you're below freezing but note again you have at least one month where there's a significant warmup and you get above that 50° range okay and so now we're in a colder part with an even greater temperature range within our severe mid latitude systems so the TGA is generally found between 50 and 70 degrees north latitude so again we're moving further away from the equator here as we move through some of our cold climates and so these would be the wide stretches of our coniferous trees that Circle the Northern Hemisphere and have the right temperature condition for that biome to exist so when we look at more pictures from northern Minnesota Northern Wisconsin up into Canada this is the type of landscape we're talking about can be very pretty during the summer when you get things to warm up and you get the ice and snow to melt in these different climates but again these places have a very wide temperature range and you can get a decent amount of snow and ice in these areas and bitter cold during the winter time there's also permafrost that exists in both the TGA and the tundra that you should be aware of so when we look at our soil conditions in these areas there are parts of the soil in some of these climates that are consistently ice and they act as ice throughout much of the year because the ground temperatures are cold enough to keep that water Frozen and so you can see these areas where you have continuous permafrost as we talk about it the darker purple areas and then areas where it's more sporadic and the more sporadic stuff gets more into the TGA The Continuous stuff gets more into the tundra itself which we'll talk about but it's important to understand that these upper layers in the permafrost are areas that can vary more okay but deeper underground where there's not as much energy that can be transmitted through conduction and stuff from the Sun warming the upper layers the deeper sediments are the ones that are more consistently Frozen and act to help stabilize that soil environment by acting more as a solid now as climate changes and as we get warm-ups in these areas where the permafrost begins to melt that creates decreasing stability where that deeper layer that has been frozen for a while begins to thaw and act more as a liquid instead of the solid and that can destabilize buildings all right moving forward into our polar climates we're going to get even colder here and you'll note that to be classified as a Polar climate you are less than 50° Fahrenheit the entire year we are then going to have classifications where we talk about tundra versus ice cap climates okay so we're going to get cold and coldest when we get into our poar climates here but remember to be a Polar climate you first have to have your warmest month lower than 50 degrees Fahrenheit so the first thing we're going to talk about is the polar type climate that still has enough of a warmup that you get some of that snow and ice to melt and this is our tundra climate so again we're getting even further north than we were now we're at 71 degrees north latitude we're moving further away from the equator okay we have a temperature range that is pretty decent here but you'll also note that again when we look at our warmest months we are still very cold and Below 50° okay but there's enough of a warmup during the summer where our daytime temperatures May reach 40 or 50 you may have records that get set above that okay but the average itself day and night is still below 50° overall but that's warm enough to melt some of that snow and that accumulates during these times a year when you're very cold in these climates and into negative temperatures and when you think about the Tundra Biome these are the types of pictures I kind of want you to associate with this and it's not just about some of the uh quote cuter animals that you see in the tundra arctic foxes polar bears reindeer seals there's other organisms that live up there that these animals can take advantage of as part of that larger biome and ecosystem and so part of the reason animals can survive up there is because you get enough of a defrost that occurs or a warmup that you can get lyans and little vegetation and things that Sprout up in certain places that they can take advantage of all right our last major polar classification is our ice cap climate so this is talking about areas like Central Greenland and Antarctica where it's cold throughout the year and there is not enough of a warmup to get rid of significant amounts of ice to actually expose vegetation uh to be present or lyans or things like that these are Barren ice sheet type areas because there's not enough energy around to actually cause significant thawing the difference between Tundra and ice cap climates remember is that the tundra does get a little bit of a summertime warmup in these areas while the ice cap climate looks much like what you see here on the bottom left throughout most of the year so this is the landscape we're talking about more with our ice cap climate versus our Tundra again where you can get some of the frosting that occurs and some of this ice will go away our ice cap climate is term that because we have enough cold temperatures throughout the year that these areas are covered in ice sheets thick glacial ice in these areas all right our last and final climate related to climates that can have freezing temperatures is our Highland Climate and not all Highland climates will necessarily have freezing temperatures but they can have freezing temperatures so I decided to cover them last here within this lecture set and our Highland climates are going to be climates where there's some elevation difference or some relief relief meaning there's a difference between the highest elevation and lowest elevation and there's a decent amount of spread there and so these are environments where you have topographic or orographic effects often times and you have to realize lapse rates exist like we've talked about in the troposphere so they're going to be colder at the top and warmer at the bottom okay so these are climates that specifically vary because of elevation and altitude differences so our Highland climates are going to be different depending on where you start off there's some mountain ranges that start in more desert based ecos systems like you see here the bottom and you see some that are more tropical okay so it really depends on where you are if you're desert or tropical but the common theme is as you go up the climate changes okay and if you have enough elevation change not all mountains get to 14 15 16,000 or more feet high but the ones that do you can get all the way up to a polar or 100 ice cap type similar climate at the peaks of these mountains but on the way up you may go all the way through subtropical to mild M latitudes to severe mid latitudes depending on how high those mountains actually get okay smaller mountains or mountains that top out at a certain elevation you may only get a couple types of like biomes or climatic zones as you go up but other ones you may get a lot of them if you have all those elevation zones present so this is showing a warmer desert start to to our Highland ecosystem this is near Glenn Canyon which is in northern Arizona and Southern Utah that area and so you see we start off in a very warm desert in that landscape and as you work your way up you make it through these different vegetation zones and as you get mountain peaks that make it all the way to over 12,000 ft in some of these areas out west you can get more of a tundra type climate at the top and if you were to get into the Himalayas and even higher you start to get into more of like an ice cap climate where you have persistent glaciers that are and ice on the landscape throughout the year and we can look at the Andes mountains that have a similar type of landscape even though now we're in South America you have different vegetation zones in these different areas but remember the soils that are present matter for what you can grow in these different areas too because if you have real Rocky Cliffs and things like that it may be too steep for for material to accumulate and to get soils and the vegetation may not be able to persist persist in those areas where it's really really Rocky and there's not as much of a soil profile so remember for climate classification go back through these lectures make sure you're comfortable going through climate graphs make sure you look at the flowchart of how we classify things if they're tropical dry mild mid latitude severe mid latitude our cold climates or our polar climates and our Highland climates okay make sure you also go back and review the things related to the biomes that I'm associated with those and the terms that I've put in red that I want you to know related to the climates that we've gone through okay from here we'll start covering historical climate and we'll move into climate change on the planet itself