COLEGIO ESTADUAL IRMÃ DULCE Professora: Assiria Caldeira Alu...

COLEGIO ESTADUAL IRMÃ DULCE Professora: Assiria Caldeira Aluno(A):

Leia o texto abaixo e responda as questões 01, 02, 03 e 04.

Where people ‘surf’ tubular clouds

At the end of a very long road in Australia’s far north, on a remote stretch of coastline along the isolated southern shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, is Burketown (population 238). Caught between savannah and sea, beneath a big outback sky, the town is not on the road to anywhere: if you’re in Burketown, you either took a wrong turn, or you really wanted to be here.

It is a land of climate extremes. Droughts scour the inland in the Dry (as the locals call the dry season), which runs from May to September or October. Sometime in October, perhaps November, the rains come down in torrential sheets. Before the road here was paved, Burketown could be cut off for weeks. Even now, a big Wet can cause flooding that submerges an area the size of a small European country.

At the tail-end of the Dry, just before the transition into the Wet, Burketown becomes the scene for one of the most remarkable natural phenomena in Australia: the Morning Glory, an immense and rare formation of tube-shaped clouds that has drawn curious crowds and dedicated storm chasers.

Forming over the tropical seas of the Gulf at a distance where two wind systems collide, the Morning Glory takes shape at night when onshore air cools and slips beneath layers of warmer air. The result is a turbulent formation of cylindrical roll or wave clouds in fronts hundreds of kilometres long. Although this dramatic and photogenic weather event occasionally occurs elsewhere in the world, including the Gulf of Mexico, Burketown is the only place on Earth where it happens on a regular basis, thanks to a unique mix of geography and local climate systems.

When the Morning Glory appears, it’s an astonishing [...] vision that reflects the power of this remarkable weather system.