# Questions tagged [meteorology]

The study of how the earth's atmosphere works, including weather forecasting. Use this tag for questions about the earth's weather. When asking questions specifically about the atmosphere, also include the [atmosphere] tag.

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41 views

### What is the largest hurricane possible?

With Earth getting hotter and hurricanes also getting larger I wonder; Is there a limit on how big a hurricane can physically get?
51 views

### What determines the direction of wind [duplicate]

What determines the direction that a wind blows? I understand that the nature of my question is immensely broad but I see no other way to phrase the question. The question surfaced in my mind when I ...
23 views

### Is there any program that gives you air temperature (and precipitation) information if you feed them the date and location (latitude,longitude)?

I know I can google each data point (latitude, longitude, date) one by one and find if the government of that country has archived past weather information. But this will take infinite amount of time ...
56 views

### Question about the sign of the shearing deformation terms

I have the following equation for the shearing term of the deformation zone in meteorology. The reference is this link: http://www.zamg.ac.at/docu/Manual/SatManu/main.htm?/docu/Manual/SatManu/CMs/Def/...
35 views

### Question about the physics of hurricanes

I've a basic misunderstanding about the formation of tropic cyclones. From the absolute point of view, cyclones form in order to conserve total angular momentum - air masses at different latitudes ...
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### Estimation on how cold will my pond get - intent is to know if certain fish can survive in it

I want to get an estimate on how cold my pond will get. It is a 1 acre pond in Central Florida USA. It has an average depth of 4 feet. There is not much circulation in the pond. It gets direct ...
23 views

### Southern Hemisphere climate

Does oceanic and land mass positioning affect tropical storm evolution in the southern hemisphere? And, do cold fronts migrate latitudinally " upwards " the way they drift "downwards" in the northern?
61 views

### Does rain itself affect barometric pressure?

I understand how and why low pressure systems are often associated with rain, but does the rain itself (both during and after) alter barometric pressure in any meaningful way?
75 views

### Is it normal for a cyclonic storm to form at the latitude of New York, USA?

I am following climate activist Greta Thunberg's sail to N America from Europe on https://tracker.borisherrmannracing.com/. The model shows a cyclonic storm forming south of Nova Scotia, east of New ...
56 views

### Is there any possible way that a tropical cyclone of any strength could form over land?

Most tropical cyclones rapidly weaken over land, however, given some conditions (such as very wet soil/ground cover and tropical lower atmospheric conditions) they can sustain themselves or even ...
35 views

### Hypothetical: an immense disc blocks sunlight, how does this affect the weather?

I have a hypothetical situation, and I am specifically interested in how this situation would affect the weather. I have asked this question elsewhere, however I feel that nobody with any expertise ...
37 views

### Why did Hurricane Harvey have so much lightning associated with it?

Hurricane Harvey was a prodigious lightning producer when it hit Houston/SE Texas. But I thought hurricanes don't have much lightning (with the eyewall being the only exception), due to tropical ...
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### What is the most optimal latitude on Earth for the generation of extreme maximum temperatures?

First question on this StackExchange, so here goes... Overall, reaching high temperatures is dependent on 2 factors: The (maximum) solar angle in the day. The greater the solar angle, the more ...
87 views

### Interpolating world data to a local grid in Python

I have an NC file that has global data with a high resolution (about 25 minutes) so a lot of coordinates. I have some measured values of some region with irregularly spaced coordinates. In order to ...
37 views

### Discrete distribution of daily rainfall [closed]

How can I estimate the rainfall rate every ten minutes during a day having the total amount of rainfall during that day ?
28 views

### Does the feel of temperature change, when you're in two different places [duplicate]

I'm from Baltimore Maryland. And our summers can be very intense sometimes a heatwave could put us at 100 degrees and with humidity it could feel like 110 degrees. Now, I have friends from the U.S. ...
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### Atmospheric conditions needed that blocks all bright light during sunsets and allows you to stare directly at the sun

Today (July 5th, 2019 just before 8 pm KST), along the Han River in Seoul, the surface of the sun could be viewed with my naked eye (no protection needed), and this was safe on the eyes. It appeared ...
101 views

### What is the difference between dew and rain?

What is the main difference between dew and rain? Would it be correct if we say that rain is done in the upper troposphere while dew done in the lower troposphere? Or there are better definitions for ...
85 views

### Why during subsidence inversion, upper layer warms more than lower layer?

Source : weather.gov This is mentioned in the book I have been reading regarding stability in atmosphere. But I am not able to pin point exact reason behind this. "As the layer subsides, it ...
61 views

### What is the physical meaning of second moment of wind velocity?

I have been reading some documents about meteorological data and many of them mention the second moment of wind velocity. I guess it has to do with the way the wind is changing but in such case I ...
35 views

### Historical isobaric charts?

I am looking for a small-scale isobaric chart, which encompasses central Africa. I am interested in the time span of the past few months. Do you know where to find it? Thanks
146 views

### Presence of Diabatic heating term in the continuity equation

The tropical circulation paper by Gill (1980) approximates vertical velocity as the sum of pressure and diabatic heating terms (equation 2.5 at page 449). Since the pressure is already a function of ...
39 views

### Application of vorticity tendency equation

I have a question about the dynamics of westward propagating vortices. In meteorology, the vorticity tendency is often used to explain the westward propagation of vortices (cyclonic circulation). A ...
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### When and where is the atmospheric greenhouse effect strongest?

Is the greenhouse effect stronger in the ice covered area or in the equator? Also is it stronger during winter or summer? I am thinking it is stronger in the Ice covered area and during winter because ...
43 views

### Do cloud formations change depending on the season?

I'm currently working on some software for cloud masking, and thus far I have only been using satellite data as recent as spring (northern hemisphere). However, I'm wondering if cloud coverage or ...
36 views

### Oscillating dew point throughout the year?

I was searching for the climate of Saudi Arabia and I noticed that the city of Abha (altitude of 7000 feet) has a "strange" behavior in its dew point, as numbeo suggests: https://www.numbeo.com/...
25 views

### Do less trees equal less rain? [duplicate]

It is said the the Sahara desert was once a dense forest until it was cut. Do trees contribute to precipitation and less trees equal less rain locally?
48 views

### Thermal likelihood formula

Background: I use the X-Plane flightsimulator for flying and gliding. In the program we have real weather (clouds, winds, etc...) but thermals are not well implemented, they don't have any connection ...
41 views

### Are there more meteorological catastrophic events due to climate change?

I was told by a sedimentologist there is no evidence of more climatic catastrophic events at the geological register previous to Pleistocene, when climate was warmer. My question is if meteorologists ...
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### How does a change in the tilt of the Earth effect climate? [duplicate]

Could the Earth survive if the axis was less or more of the tilt of that what it is now, and by how much? How would the Earth act if the axis was pushed to an extreme tilt or lack there of?
164 views

### What is the synoptic/atmospheric setup that is causing the U.S. severe weather outbreak in May 2019?

I asked this in the chat and it was suggested I ask on the main site. There's been a seemingly perpetual severe weather outbreak over the central and eastern U.S. over the past two weeks. Killer EF3s ...
77 views

### What is brown carbon?

There is a lot of interest in brown carbon in the atmospheric science community these days. There is a paper in the journal, "Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics" titled, "Black carbon or brown carbon? ...
65 views

### Initiation of Rossby waves during MJO

I am trying to understand the basic dynamics of MJO, where I find several studies which relate it to the initiation of equatorial Rossby and Kelvin waves. Though MJO is an eastward propagating wave, I ...
65 views

### Can I interpolate rainfall data from stations outside of watershed for the watershed?

I have only few station inside the watershed so I want to use the stations outside if I can to get better results
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### Characteristics of saddle points in stream line charts

I am trying to locate saddle points or commonly known as "col" in synoptic meteorology. This is "z" in the following figure. References Here are some of the references regarding this. a). http://www....
47 views

### What exactly are “ambient aerosols”?

I see this term being used everywhere, but I have not been able to find a formal definition for "ambient aerosols".
118 views

### Locating shearlines or deformation zones in a map

I am looking for a way to detect shearlines or confluence regions such as that shown in the figure below (red dashed line). I was able to derive the stretching, shear, and total deformations. The ...
56 views

### Moisture flux convergence/divergence calculation in Grads

I want to calculate moisture flux divergence/convergence in 850 hpa for the summer and I have monthly mean gridded data sdfopen shum.mon.mean.nc sdfopen uwind.mon.mean.nc sdfopen vwind.mon.mean.nc ...
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### How big of an event is needed to trigger a long winter?

Could a small meteor or natural nuclear explosion melt an ice cap on Earth to trigger a mini ice age without the event being observed by people? Can the Earth have an overlaying thermal cycle that ...
133 views

### Are these plane trails seen from satellite

Here are photos from West of Normandy, at 7-9am after sunrise on the 14th of may, from the visible satellite. It's a bit strange that they are visible from space, they are 2-3 miles wide? Are they jet ...
92 views

### Does this weather pattern have a name?

The past few weeks of spring in northern Ohio I believe I have noticed a weather pattern where the weather forecast will show a string of days with rain, but what happens is the day is mostly clear, ...
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### Decomposition of variables in horizontal and vertical modes

I have a query regarding the practical applicability of variable separable method. Usually we decompose the variables w.r.t components corresponding to different dimensions, this method is used to ...
103 views

### How to improve this prediction about the climate in future?

The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the more global warming. The more global warming the more cloud formations that cool the earth and clean the air from carbon dioxid when rain- and snowfall, ...
44 views

### Get atmospheric pressure values through JavaScript

I'm working on a programming project in which I want to show isobars on a map with OpenStreetMap and the HTML tag canvas. The main problem that I'm facing is the dificulty of retrieving consistent ...
48 views

### Can extratropical cyclones force global cooling?

We are living in a historical period of global warming since about 20,000 years ago. This global warming period is one of about ten in human history. Those periods may very well be forced to start by ...
73 views

### Atmospheric pressure in weather forecasts: actual pressure or sea-level pressure [duplicate]

What is the usual way to report surface pressure in weather forecasts online, in smartphone apps, on TV/radio? Is it the actual local pressure or the sea-level adjusted value? Does it differ by ...
70 views

### Computation of geostrophic wind

I am attempting to calculate the zonal and meridional components of geostrophic wind using the equations below: $u_g = -\frac{g_0}{f} \cdot \frac{1}{r} \cdot \frac{\partial \Phi }{\partial \phi}$ \$...
74 views

### Using salinity to predict rainfall

Recently, a new method has been proposed by Ray Schmitt (WHOI) and collaborators to use salinity patterns in the ocean to predict weather events (more specifically, rainfall) at scales from weeks to ...