Weather+of+the+Arctic+Tundra!

= Home The Weather of the Arctic Tundra !!!!! Animals Page Activities=

The Arctic is hard to describe because it covers such a huge area. One way to define the Arctic is by its climate and ecology The Arctic is everything north of the 10°C (50°F) summer isotherm, which represents the average temperature in July. An isotherm indicates a line of equal or constant temperature, and it’s used to show temperature distributions on weather maps. The summer isotherm is basically tree line for most of the Arctic, though a lot of Arctic maps also include the Subarctic when drawing boundaries around the northern polar region.  The Arctic Circle (66° 33’N latitude) is near the limit of the midnight sun and the polar night. The Arctic winter is around nine months long, when the polar night lasts 20-24 hours. The midnight sun occurs in the summer, when the sun is still visible at midnight. The tundra is an unusually cold and  dry climate. Precipitation totals  6-10 inches of rain a year, which  includes melted snow.The short summer lasts only 6 to 10 weeks.  It never gets any warmer than 45 or 50° F. The warmer weather causes a layer of permafrost, ice that never goes  away in the ground, to melt,  creating bogs and shallow lakes that don't drain.