Feb. 21, 2008

Interactive Quiz #130:
Weather or Not

Clouds, as Joni Mitchell warns, may get in your way, but knowing what's around you in the atmosphere turns weather challenges into clear skies. Well, maybe not, but it makes answering these questions much easier.

INSTRUCTIONS: Answer the questions as best you can, then click on the "Score my quiz answers" button to see your score and read the explanations. If you don't like your score the first time around, you can change some of your answers and resubmit. To get the most out of this quiz, we suggest you keep trying until you get a perfect score.

NOTE: When more than one answer is true, only the most complete, correct answer will be scored as correct. The answers are assumed to apply within the United States unless otherwise noted.

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1. Any student pilot who stayed awake in ground school knows that a ridge is an elongated area of high pressure, and a trough is an elongated area of low pressure. Only members of the Brainteaser Inner Circle, however, know that a (_____) is the intersection between a ridge and a trough, or an area of neutrality between two highs or two lows. (Please fill in the blank.)
a. Noy
b. Col
c. Ter
d. Gin
e. Wedgie

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2. We live, walk, breathe and preflight our airplanes in the troposphere. It extends from the surface to about 48,000 feet over the equator and up to 20,000 feet over the two poles. This is where most weather happens. Thunderstorms like to challenge that concept by punching into a higher atmospheric layer. The top of the troposphere is called the ...
a. Tropopause
b. Tropophase
c. Torpogesic
d. Stratosphere

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3. Air expands and cools as it rises due to decreased air pressure. In descending air, the opposite is true. As pressure increases in descending air, temperature increases as it's compressed. These two conditions are called ...
a. Adibatic heating and adibatic cooling
b. Abiabatic heating and abiabatic cooling
c. Adriatic heating and adriatic cooling
d. Adiabatic heating and adiabatic cooling

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4. As you climb higher in the atmosphere, the outside air temperature (OAT) normally reads lower. What condition exists when temperature increases with altitude?
a. An inversion
b. A revision
c. An incursion
d. An infusion

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5. While riding your Triumph motorcycle home from the airport along California's coastal highway in the late afternoon, you encounter fog that formed over the open, cool water. It's been carried on shore by a breeze of less than 15 knots. That's a lot to consider when you should've been watching the curve in the road. As you skid off the highway, you think: Hey, that type of fog is called ...
a. Radiation fog
b. Advection fog
c. Upslope fog
d. Steam fog

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6. Fog is a surface-based cloud. When it no longer touches the ground, it becomes a layer of low stratus and may even qualify as a ceiling. Ceiling is defined as the lowest layer of clouds reported as ...
a. Broken or overcast, or the vertical visibility into an obscuration like fog or haze
b. Scattered, broken or overcast, or the vertical visibility into an obscuration like fog or haze
c. Few, scattered, broken or overcast, or the vertical visibility into an obscuration like fog or haze
d. Overcast

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7. The contraction BINOVC means ...
a. Balloons in overcast (radiosonde NOTAM)
b. Breaks in overcast
c. Been in (the) overcast (PIREP)
d. Base (of) inversion overcast

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8. Condensation trails are called "contrails" and are generated in the wake of aircraft flying in clear, cold, humid air. What type of wake-cloud formation is caused by the heat of exhaust gases from an aircraft flying in a thin cloud layer, creating a rift in the clouds?
a. Conrails
b. Mistrails
c. Distrails
d. Mistrials

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9. What name is given to a katabatic wind as it blows downslope and produces dramatic warming over the plains just east of the Rocky Mountains?
a. Schnook winds
b. Chinook winds
c. Nanook winds
d. Santa Ana winds

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10. Enough weather ... let's talk ATC, instead, and toss out a relatively new ATC term: ERAM. While the rest of the flying world is all agog over ADS-B, ATC futurists know that ERAM may hold broader and more immediate promise for unclogging a bit of the NAS. But none of that's going to happen until we decipher the acronyms: NAS is National Airspace System, ADS-B is Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, and ATC means Angry Tired Controller. No, that's not right. ATC means Air Traffic Control. Angry and tired is how controllers feel in understaffed facilities at the end of a midnight shift. ERAM means:
a. En Route Aviation Modularization
b. En Route Automation Module
c. En Route Automation Matrix
d. En Route Automation Modernization

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11. Bonus aircraft ID question. See the photo below, scratch your head and name that airplane.

Photo courtesy of the Antique Airplane Association archive.

a. Ercoupe 415G
b. Culver Cadet
c. Stitts Playboy
d. Emigh Trojan
e. Mooney Mite

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