Tag: the biosphere

A biome is a community of plants and animals that have common characteristics for the environment they exist in. They can be found over a range of continents. Biomes are distinct biological communities that have formed in response to a shared physical climate.

Equatorial type of climate, also known as tropi­cal rainforest wet climate , is located up to 5° to 10° latitudes on either side of the equator but at some places it extends up to 15°-25° latitudes mainly along the eastern margins of the continents.

The equatorial climate is found in the following localities:

(i) The Amazon Basin in South America,

(ii) The Congo Basin in Africa,

(iii) Guinea coast in Africa,

(iv) Much of the Indo-Malaysian Region mainly in Java, Sumatra, Bor­neo, Malaysia, Singapore and New Guinea,

(v) Philip­pine Islands,

(vi) Eastern central America (parts of Panama, Costarica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala etc.), some islands in the Caribbean Sea, western Columbia and eastern Madagascar.

Biomes are largely based on the geography and climate of a region. Therefore, a biome is a Geoclimatic zone that is identifiable on a global scale and includes things such as plants and animals.

The Sahara desert is the world's largest hot desert. It is the third-largest desert behind Antarctica and the Arctic, which are both cold deserts.

Amazon basin is located in South America at 10° N and 10° S of the tropical region. This region is also referred to as the equatorial region. The Amazon river flows through the region and reaches the Atlantic Ocean through the mountains in the west.

• The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for 900,000 square kilometers, covering much of Botswana, parts of Namibia and regions of South Africa.
• The Sahara is a desert located on the African continent. It is the largest hot desert in the world and the third-largest desert overall after Antarctica and the Arctic region.
• The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,000-km (600-mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains.
• Deserts of Australia:

Generally, A desert is defined as an area that receives less than 10 inches or 25 cms of precipitation a year, of precipitation a year. Deserts that receive rain as their main form of precipitation is called hot deserts., while deserts that receive snow as their main form of precipitation is called cold deserts.

The convectional rainfall occurs due to the thermal convection currents caused due to the heating of ground due to insolation.The convectional rainfall is prevalent in equatorial regions. In these, the warm air rises up and expands then, reaches at a cooler layer and saturates, then condenses mainly in the form of cumulus or cumulonimbus clouds. In the equatorial regions, the precipitation due to convectional rainfall occurs in the afternoon