K-5 GeoSource. PDF version. Learn More. What is the difference between weather and climate? The warmest temperatures are pale yellow, while the coldest temperatures are dark blue. Moderate temperatures are depicted in shades of pink and purple. Regions where land surface temperature measurements were not possible are gray. The most obvious pattern that the maps show is a global one: vegetation is abundant around the equator all year long, where temperatures are high.
Rainfall and sunlight are also abundant. Between the equator and the poles, the vegetation greenness rises and falls as the seasons change and temperatures warm and cool. Regional patterns of temperature and vegetation also exist.
For example, the land surface temperatures of southeastern Canada stay colder longer in the Northern Hemisphere spring than they do in Europe, even though they are at the same latitude. Peper, S. Maco, and Q. Journal of Forestry 8 — Skip to main content.
Heat Islands. Contact Us. Trees and Vegetation Resources. Contact Us to ask a question, provide feedback, or report a problem. Plants also produce their own micro-weather by controlling the humidity and temperature immediately surrounding their leaves through transpiration.
Most plants and forest soils have a very low albedo, about. Figure A. Land use over US. Since climate is basically an average of the weather over a long period of time, vegetation is important to climate.
Plants also help keep our climate stable over time by offsetting temperature and moisture fluctuations through transpiration. Plants also use carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, which slightly offsets the amount of greenhouse gas being released in the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels.
Vegetation is necessary for normal weather and climate. There are nearly 2 billion acres of land in the continental United States. Land use classifies the types of vegetation on the land.
In the past thirty years, there has been an increase in developed land and a decrease in cultivated crop land. An increase in developed land means more areas are covered by buildings, concrete and asphalt. It is interesting to note that historical land use changes have also affected the climate of the Southeast.
In Georgia, for example, around there were large areas of bare ground associated with cotton fields and other crops. By the late s, most of Georgia over 70 percent had reverted to pine and deciduous forests once cotton was no longer farmed due to the boll weevil beetle which feeds on cotton buds and flowers and soil degradation.
Some climatologists think that the slight cooling of the Southeast over the s may have been due in part to the higher evapotranspiration and cooler conditions associated with forests compared to bare ground in cropland.
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