Consider the following statements with reference to Mediterranean climate :
1. It receives rainfall in winter season.
2. Due to winter solstice, air pressure belts shift to the South.
Which of the abo

Question

Consider the following statements with reference to Mediterranean climate :
1. It receives rainfall in winter season.
2. Due to winter solstice, air pressure belts shift to the South.
Which of the above statements is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, Both 1 and 2. Statement 1 is the defining property of the climate. The Mediterranean type (Koppen 'Cs', the warm temperate western-margin climate) is the only major climate on Earth with a dry summer and a wet winter, and every textbook profile shows it: heavy falls from November to February, effectively nothing in July and August, with modest annual totals. Statement 2 supplies the reason. At the December solstice the sun's overhead position has migrated to the Tropic of Capricorn, and the whole global machinery of pressure and wind belts — the equatorial low, the subtropical highs, the westerlies, the polar front — migrates southward behind it. That southward shift is what changes the weather over the Mediterranean lands, which lie roughly between 30 and 45 degrees North on the western sides of continents. In summer the subtropical high sits squarely over them, air subsides, and no rain falls; when the belts slide south in winter, the high retreats towards the equator and the westerly belt with its travelling polar-front depressions moves in over the same latitudes, bringing the winter rain of statement 1. So the two statements are not two separate facts but a fact and its cause, which is why the key marks both correct. One honest qualification a serious student should carry: the statement is written from a Northern Hemisphere standpoint. Mediterranean-climate regions in the Southern Hemisphere — central Chile, the Cape of South Africa, southern and south-western Australia — have their winter in June and July, when the belts shift north instead. And the belts lag the sun by several weeks, so their extreme position is reached a little after the solstice, not on the day itself.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Rejects statement 1, but statement 1 is the single most examinable property of the Mediterranean climate: rain concentrated in the winter half of the year and drought in summer. Discarding it would leave a climate that is wet in summer, which is the China type or the monsoon type, not the Mediterranean type.  (b) Rejects both, and both are standard. Winter rainfall is what the climate is named for in every classification, and the seasonal migration of the pressure belts with the apparent movement of the sun is the mechanism that produces it. Nothing in the pair is false.  (c) The most tempting wrong answer, because statement 2 sounds like a claim that needs checking while statement 1 feels safe. But the pressure belts genuinely do shift with the sun — southward around the December solstice, northward around the June solstice — by several degrees of latitude. That shift is exactly why the subtropical high vacates the Mediterranean in winter and lets the westerlies in. Statement 2 is correct, and it is the explanation of statement 1.

Concept: The Mediterranean climate occupies the western margins of continents between roughly 30 and 45 degrees of latitude in both hemispheres, sandwiched between the hot deserts on the equatorward side and the cool temperate west-coast climate on the poleward side. Its whole character comes from sitting on the boundary of two wind systems and being handed to each in turn. In the summer half of the year the subtropical high-pressure belt lies overhead, air subsides, and the season is hot, cloudless and dry. In the winter half the belts have migrated equatorward, the region falls inside the westerlies, and cyclonic depressions travelling along the polar front deliver the year's rain. Because the moisture arrives in the cool season and the growing warmth arrives in the dry season, the vegetation has to survive summer drought: hence the sclerophyllous evergreen scrub with waxy leaves, thick bark and deep roots.

State PCS 2024 Q79 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q79 — Geography PYQ with Answer