Pathfinder Weather Honor

The Pathfinder Weather honor teaches you to read the sky with method and to understand why the central coast of São Paulo, in Brazil, gets more than 3,000 mm of rain a year while the Cariri region of Paraíba stays between 300 and 500 mm. The complete Weather honor requirements are in the catalog under code EN-016 (listed there as the Climatology Honor); here they appear summarized, with no answer key.

🌦️What is the Pathfinder Weather honor?

The Weather honor has the code EN-016 and belongs to the Nature Study area. According to the catalog, it was created in 1944 by the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and is level 2, with no prerequisite. In Brazil it is called Climatologia, and the Desbravai catalog lists it in English as the Climatology Honor.

It is one of the options for the Explorer class, the class for 12-year-olds: in the South American Division (DSA) list on adventistas.org, in Portuguese, item 2 of Nature Study asks for one honor among Astronomy, Cacti, Weather, Flowers and Animal Tracking. Next comes the Weather - Advanced honor (EN-028), level 3.

📋What are the Weather honor requirements?

When in doubt, your instructor's version counts. Three requirements already have a guide on the portal: predicting the weather from clouds, lightning and thunder and the seasons of the year. For types of lightning, the U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) uses cloud-to-ground, intra-cloud, cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-air.

Summary of the EN-016 honor requirements in the Desbravai catalog.

🌍What is the difference between weather and climate?

Weather is the state of the atmosphere in one place at one moment, like this afternoon's rain. Climate, in the 2021 glossary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is the average weather, over a classic 30-year period defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

That is where climate normals come from: 30-year averages that the WMO recommends updating every decade. Brazil's national weather service, the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (National Institute of Meteorology, INMET), released the Climatological Normals of Brazil 1991-2020 on March 23, 2022, with temperature, rainfall, pressure, dew point and prevailing wind direction for each weather station.

One cold week says little about climate. There are short-term natural causes: according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Pinatubo volcano in the Philippines sent about 22 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in 1991, and the droplets that formed blocked part of the sunlight, cooling some regions by as much as 0.5 °C. On the long-term trend, the IPCC Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), from 2023, puts the planet's surface 1.1 °C warmer in 2011-2020 than in 1850-1900 and attributes the warming to human activities, mainly greenhouse gas emissions.

To classify climates, scientists use the Köppen system: the map by Clayton Alvares and colleagues (2013), built with rainfall data from 2,950 stations, found 12 climate types in Brazil.

Alvares and colleagues (Meteorologische Zeitschrift, 2013). The tropical zone adds up to 81.4% of the territory; Cwc, Csa and Csb cover less than 0.01% each.

💧How do fog, dew, frost, hail and snow form?

Almost all the phenomena in requirement 1 start the same way: the air cools until it can no longer hold the vapor it carries. That temperature is called the dew point. What changes is where the cooling happens and whether the surface is above or below 0 °C.

The WMO International Cloud Atlas (2017 edition) calls it fog when the droplets cut visibility to less than 1 km; above that it is mist, and in everyday speech the two words get mixed up. Rain is covered in the guide to the water cycle, useful for the requirement 10 drawing. With hail, according to the NSSL, a storm's updrafts carry drops into very cold regions, where they freeze and grow by capturing other drops, until they weigh more than the updraft can hold. Snow needs strong cold plus moisture: on May 29, 2025, the Civil Defense (Defesa Civil) of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, recorded snow in São Joaquim, Urupema, Bom Jardim da Serra and Urubici.

Sources: WMO International Cloud Atlas (2017) and NSSL.

🌡️How do a thermometer, a barometer and a rain gauge work?

A liquid thermometer works by expansion: the liquid in the bulb grows in volume with heat and rises through a very thin tube, explains the Museo Galileo in Florence. Since January 1, 2019, Brazil's health regulator, the Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (Anvisa), has banned the manufacture, import and sale of mercury clinical thermometers (RDC 145/2017); for the weather chart, use a digital one.

The mercury barometer dates from 1644, when Evangelista Torricelli turned a glass tube full of mercury upside down in a basin of the same metal. The column stopped at about 76 cm, held up by air pressure, and it rises or falls when the pressure changes. The aneroid barometer, perfected by the Frenchman Lucien Vidie in the 1840s, uses a metal capsule with a partial vacuum that swells or shrinks and moves a pointer.

The rain gauge collects rain in a container with an opening of known size. According to Simepar, the environmental monitoring system of the Brazilian state of Paraná, 1 mm of rain equals 1 liter of water over 1 square meter.

⛰️What is orographic rainfall, and why does it rain on one side of a mountain range?

Orographic rainfall, or relief rain, happens when moist wind meets a mountain range and has to rise. As it rises, the air expands and cools, the vapor condenses and rain falls on the slope facing the wind. On the other side, the air comes down drier: that is the rain shadow. It is colder higher up: in NASA's atmosphere model, temperature drops about 6.5 °C every 1,000 m.

On the 2013 Köppen map, the central coast of São Paulo tops 3,000 mm of rain a year because of the Serra do Mar, the coastal mountain range. On February 18 and 19, 2023, a cold front, a cyclone off the coast and a warmer ocean added to that effect, and Bertioga (São Paulo state) received 683 mm in 24 hours, according to data from the Centro Nacional de Monitoramento e Alertas de Desastres Naturais (Cemaden), Brazil's national center for natural disaster monitoring and early warning, cited by the magazine Pesquisa FAPESP. In Paraíba, a 2021 study in the Revista Brasileira de Geografia Física sums it up: the coast gets 1,200 to 1,600 mm a year and the Cariri and Curimataú regions 300 to 500 mm, because the Borborema Plateau blocks part of the Atlantic moisture.

Convection drives the wind: heated air becomes less dense and rises, and cooler air takes its place. According to NOAA, during the day the air over land warms, rises and leaves low pressure behind, and cool air from the sea moves in as a sea breeze; at night, the land cools below the ocean temperature and the flow reverses. Much higher up, jet streams are bands of strong wind near 9,100 m (30,000 ft) of altitude that can exceed 440 km/h (275 mph) and follow the boundary between warm and cold air; the subtropical jet sits near latitude 30°, the latitude of Rio Grande do Sul, in southern Brazil.

📡How do radar, satellites and computers forecast the weather?

Radar sees rain from the inside: Cemaden's radar in São José dos Campos (São Paulo state), from 2021, covers a 400 km radius and measures drops and hail in storm clouds, according to Agência Brasil. The satellite sees from above: NOAA's GOES-19 has operated as GOES-East since April 7, 2025, about 35,800 km above the equator. The supercomputer puts it all together and calculates the future state of the atmosphere; in December 2025, the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, inaugurated Jaci, the successor to Tupã, to run MONAN, the new Brazilian model. INPE's Centro de Previsão de Tempo e Estudos Climáticos (CPTEC), its center for weather forecasting and climate studies, publishes numerical weather forecasts, satellite images and frost forecasts on its website.

INMET sorts its warnings into three levels. Cemaden, created in 2011, sends landslide and flood alerts to the Centro Nacional de Gerenciamento de Riscos e Desastres (Cenad), Brazil's national center for risk and disaster management, and to the municipal Civil Defense offices. To get alerts on your phone in Brazil, text your postal code (CEP) to 40199; the step-by-step is in Civil Defense phone alerts. Outside Brazil, follow the warnings of your country's national weather service.

INMET storm warning criteria checked on October 6, 2026; the last column is an editorial suggestion.

🧪How do you make a homemade rain gauge and keep a weather chart?

A teaching guide on eduCAPES, a Brazilian open educational resources portal, with material from Cemaden, says to cut off the neck of a smooth PET plastic bottle (with an adult's help), steady the base and set the homemade rain gauge at least 1.5 m above the ground, in an open area. Pour the water into a measuring cup and use the guide's formula: P = 10 × V ÷ A (V in mL; A, the area of the opening, in cm²). With a 10 cm opening (78.5 cm²), 157 mL means 20 mm.

The weather vane can be a poster-board arrow pinned to a pencil eraser, with a tail bigger than the tip: it turns until it points to where the wind is coming from. Mark N, S, E and W with a compass. Under the U.S. National Weather Service rule, wind is named for the direction it comes from. Both pieces are classroom builds, without the accuracy of an official station.

For the chart, take readings at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. INMET's station table uses UTC (subtract 3 hours for Brasília time): 12 UTC is 9 a.m. in Brasília and 00 UTC is 9 p.m. the previous day, so you can compare your record with the nearest official station.

Common mistakes:

• Thermometer in the sun. Always read it in the shade.
• Rain gauge under a tree or an eave. The canopy and the roof deflect the rain.

Requirement 13 asks you to read Genesis 1, Jonah 1 and 2 and Matthew 8:23-27, where Jesus calms the storm, before the discussion. When you are ready, check the complete Weather honor requirements in the catalog and arrange the evaluation with your instructor.

Template for the requirement 12 weather chart (a simple Weather honor worksheet): 14 readings over seven days.