Climate zones and biomes
Geography · Key Stage 2 · The School
Weather is not climate
WEATHER is what it is doing today. CLIMATE is the pattern over many years. A cold day in July does not change Britain's climate, and one hot summer does not either — which is exactly why climate arguments built on a single day are worthless in both directions.
The zones
Roughly: TROPICAL near the equator (hot, wet), ARID a little further out (hot, dry — most deserts sit here), TEMPERATE in the middle latitudes (Britain: mild, wet, four seasons), and POLAR at the ends (cold all year). The pattern follows latitude, because latitude decides how directly the Sun's energy arrives.
Biomes follow climate
A BIOME is a large community of life suited to its climate: rainforest, desert, grassland, temperate forest, tundra. Rainforest sits where it is hot and wet; tundra where it is cold and the ground is frozen. Tell someone the climate and they can predict the biome — which is a real, testable piece of geography.
A graph shows rainfall bars and a temperature line for one place. Temperature stays between 26 and 28 °C all year; rainfall is over 200 mm every single month. Hot, wet, no real seasons: TROPICAL RAINFOREST. Now a second place: temperature swings from 2 °C to 22 °C, rainfall under 50 mm a month with a summer peak. Cold winters, warm summers, moderate rain: TEMPERATE. Two graphs, two biomes, read off the shapes.