Geography Quiz: Climate and Rainfall of India

As the monsoon retreats in October and November the wind direction reverses and air moves from the land towards the sea.

The pre-monsoon thundery showers of Karnataka are called cherry blossom showers or blossom showers because they help the coffee plants of the Kodagu, Chikkamagaluru and Hassan belt to flower.

The monsoon trough is the belt of low pressure that lies across the northern plains during the rainy season and guides the depressions that bring rain.

An isohyet is a line drawn on a map through all the places that receive the same amount of rainfall in a given period.

In the Koeppen classification as applied to India, the semi-arid steppe climate marked BShw covers parts of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and the drier interior of the peninsula, where rainfall is low but not as low as in a true desert.

The south-west monsoon normally sets in over the Kerala coast about the first of June, and the sudden heavy downpour that marks its arrival is called the burst of the monsoon.

Mawsynram lies in the Khasi hills, and the neighbouring Cherrapunji, now called Sohra, stands close behind it.

These are the violent evening thunderstorms of the months before the monsoon in West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Assam, and the name means the calamity of the month of Baisakh because the squalls can flatten huts and trees.

These are low pressure systems, that is temperate cyclones, which form over the Mediterranean and the Caspian region and travel eastwards with the westerly jet stream.

El Nino is the periodic warming of the surface water of the central and eastern Pacific off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, and the name, meaning the child, was given by fishermen because it appears around Christmas.