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Weather
 It's Just a Front

It's Just a Front
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   high interest, readability grades 4 to 5
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   4.11

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    violent, lasts, mass, showers, section, stationary, such, several, combination, kinds, cause, neither, weather, upward, crash, affect

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It's Just a Front
By Patti Hutchison 		  
1     The weather forecaster says a cold front is coming your way. How cold will it be? Will it rain or snow? How long will it last? What is a front?
 
2     Giant air masses are constantly forming over the earth. These air masses can be warm and wet or dry and cold. They are always on the move. When two different air masses crash into each other, a front is formed. There are four different kinds of fronts: cold fronts, warm fronts, stationary fronts, and occluded fronts. Fronts can stretch for miles or affect only a section of the country. But they always bring changes in the weather.
 
3     A cold front contains cold, dense air. When it bumps into a warmer air mass, it forces the warm air up along a steep front. The warm air rises and cools. It condenses and forms clouds. You can feel the air getting cooler. Rain or snow showers occur ahead of the front. Sometimes there are thunderstorms. In fact, cold fronts can cause violent weather such as tornadoes. The precipitation usually lasts only a little while. A blue line with triangles shows a cold front on the weather map. The triangles point in the direction the front is headed.

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