Haryana Quiz: Climate, Soils and Forests of Haryana

The loo is the hot, dry wind that blows from the west and north-west over the plains of Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh in May and June.

The Shivalik districts of Panchkula, Ambala and Yamunanagar in the north-east catch the first of the monsoon against the foothills and receive the heaviest rain of the state, while the south-western districts of Sirsa, Bhiwani and Mahendragarh lie towards the dry Thar margin and receive the least.

Panchkula lies in the Shivalik foothills at the north-eastern corner of the state.

Rausli is the loam of the central Haryana plain, a balanced mixture of sand, silt and clay.

Bhur is the light, loose, sandy soil found in Sirsa, Hisar, Bhiwani and Mahendragarh, where Haryana shades into the sandy tract of Rajasthan.

The Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, a research institute under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, is at Karnal. It works on reclaiming salt-affected and alkaline land, on gypsum treatment and subsurface drainage, and on salt-tolerant crop varieties, all problems that Haryana's canal-irrigated districts face directly.

In the national division of the country into agro-climatic regions, the Trans-Gangetic Plains region covers Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Chandigarh and the Ganganagar tract of Rajasthan.

The peepal, Ficus religiosa, is the state tree of Haryana. It is a long-lived tree of the plain, planted at village meeting places and shrines, and the state's scheme that pays a pension for the care of very old trees protects many peepals among them.

Karoh Peak stands in the Morni hills of Panchkula district, in the Shivalik belt at the northern edge of the state, and rises to about 1,467 metres.

The Shivalik belt of Panchkula and Yamunanagar carries dry deciduous forest with sal, khair, shisham and sain, while the Aravalli spurs of the south and the dry south-west carry thorn forest of kikar or babool, khejri, ber and dhak.

Where canal water has been applied for decades without matching drainage, the water table creeps up towards the surface. Capillary action then draws water upward, it evaporates in the dry heat, and the dissolved salts it carried are left behind as the white crust of kallar or reh.

These are low pressure systems that form over the Mediterranean and West Asia and travel east with the westerly jet stream, reaching north-west India in winter.