Game for reading climate graphs and recognising climate types
A geography game for learning to read climate graphs, the chart that combines a place’s average temperature and rainfall for every month in a single drawing. Every round brings a new graph, generated from one of the seven climates studied at school: equatorial, tropical, desert, Mediterranean, oceanic, continental and polar. On easy you find the warmest or wettest month; on medium you recognise the climate, work out the temperature range and count the dry months; on hard, southern-hemisphere graphs appear, where summer falls in January.
Geography · Upper primary, Secondary, Sixth Form
The graphs are generated from each climate’s rules instead of copying a few cities, so they cannot be learnt by heart. To get them right you have to look at what really sets each climate apart: whether there are months below freezing, whether summer is dry, whether it rains all year or whether the temperature barely changes.
The graph uses the Gaussen scale found in textbooks: rainfall is on double the temperature scale, so a month is dry when its bar does not reach the line. When the answer is shown, the dry months turn orange, and the P < 2T rule is seen rather than memorised.
The temperature range with minimums below zero (25 − (−8) is 33 degrees, not 17), mixing up oceanic and Mediterranean because both are mild, or not noticing that a graph with heat in January is from the southern hemisphere. The wrong options are exactly those mistakes.
"A graph appears with temperatures between 10 °C in January and 26 °C in July. The rain bars are tall in autumn and winter and almost vanish in June, July and August, below the red line. Which climate is it? Mild winters and a dry, hot summer: Mediterranean. If the bars were tall in summer too and temperatures stayed below 19 °C, it would be oceanic."
Prefer to learn without screens? Try this analogue version:
Look up your town’s climate averages on the national weather service website: average temperature and rainfall for each month.
On graph paper, draw the rain bars with 20 mm for every 10 °C on the temperature scale.
On top, draw the temperature line. Colour the months whose bar is below the line.
Work out the temperature range and total rainfall and decide which climate it is.
If you like Climate Graph, these activities work similar skills:
So as not to confuse weather and climate: here you read a single day’s forecast and decide what to wear.
Multiple choice on the layers of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect and climate change.
Another geography game about reading charts: young and ageing pyramids, gaps and baby booms.
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