Friday, December 2, 2011

Let's get physical

Looking at Ranohira on a Micro Scale;
A) Are there any naturally occurring valleys or depression?
Because the majority of Ranohira's land is used for farming and raising livestock there are really no major land depressions.
B) Orographic influences:
Urban Heat Islands? Like i mentioned before, the majority of the land is used for farming so there aren't many urbanized areas. However the areas that are urbanized are much different than what we in America consider Urbanized.

Source: Panoramio.com
Notice the buildings are still poorly built and they do not have paved roads, they are just dirt. Tough building anything does disturb the climate their cities would not have as much of a heating affect as American cities do.
Natural Vegetation Changes?
Aside from clearing space for roads Ranohira doesn't make much changes to the natural Vegetation either. Below is a photo of what a street would look like . Notice all of the vegetation and trees surrounding the road. Also much like thier cities the roads are unpaved thus having less of a climate changing effect.

Source:egypttoday.co.za
unfortunately i could not find how close my weather station was to any irrigation so i can not express how that effects the climate.

Looking at Ranohira on a Meso Scale
A) Orographic situation-Mountain Chains.
The Tsaratanana mountain range runs through madagascar. But it is primarily in the northern half and does not reach Ranohira.
B) Proximity to large bodies of water
The largest body of water in Madagascar is Lake Alaotra; it is approximately 40 km long but it does not stretch into Ranohira. Below is a photo illustrating the location of this Lake

Source:Permaas.nl
Ranohira is also located 200km away from the Indian Ocean. I think that because this is a larger body of water it would have a greater influence on the weather than the lake does.
C) Circulatory patterns and air mass dominance.
As mentioned in one of my earlier blogs Ranohira is affected by th ITCZ and a maritime polar air mass.

Under the Koppen/Geiger classification map Ranohira is dark green (Cfa) meaning that the main climate is warm temperate, the precipitation is fully humid, and the tempereature is classified as hot summer.

Source: class slides

From what i have observed from my station there have been no major changes in the temperature and precipitation patterns of Ranohira. I think that this is due to them not making any major changes to the land. Keeping the roads unpaved and natural vegetation as well as having much less urban areas results to having a more stable climate because you aren't interfering with the things that affect it.

No comments:

Post a Comment