Weather Forecast Maps
For Landscape Photography

With a little knowledge of weather forecast maps you can tell, at a glance, what the weather is going to be like in any given place. To start off with, let's take a look at high and low pressure systems. High pressure (H) indicates an area where it's fine and sunny weather with little or no cloud. It can often bring sea and coastal fog in Summer and cloud and fog in Winter.

Low pressure (L) areas are unsettled, which usually means rain and high winds. The lines you see circling high or low pressure areas on weather maps are called "isobars". These are lines of equal pressure that circle areas of high and low pressure. The closer those lines are to each other, the stronger the winds.

Weather forecast maps show three categories of front that are usually associated with areas of low pressure:

• Warm Fronts (symbolised by red half-circles along a line the represents the front) show warmer air moving in which usually indicates rain.

• Cold Fronts (symbolised by blue triangles along a line that represents the front) show colder air is moving in and, again, this usually means rain or showers

• Occluded Fronts (symbolised by alternating red semi-circles and blue triangles along a line that representd the front) are a mixture of the two and (yet again) usually indicate rainfall.

Note:If your part of the world doesn't appear on any of the maps below, click on any of the maps to see options for your region on the detailed page that will appear.

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