# 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.

739 questions
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### 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 ...
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### 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
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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/...
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### 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?
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### 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 ...
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### 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?
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### 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 ...
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### What is the minimum rain velocity that harms crops?

I,m trying to make a science project which will protect crops from heavy rainfall. I need to know the velocity that causes crops to lodge and other harms. The velocity varies for the size of the rain ...
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### 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? ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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....
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### 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".
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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, ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### 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 ...
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### Data for plotting tephigrams

I want to plot some tephigrams. Where can I find pressure, temperature and dewpoint data in text format?
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### Any appreciable differences in microclimate on the shores of small mountain streams?

I have land in India (the tropics), in the hills, on a slope from 6800 feet - 5200 ft altitude (roughly). At that lowest point there's a stream of about 10-15m across. On one side is our land, on the ...
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### What are these Gizmos at Mauna Loa Observatory?

Artist Rosten Wu's Vimeo channel has a video title Bridging Time and there is discussion about the Keeling Curve and the site where it all began in Hawaii. In the video there is a shot of a weather ...
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### How do I interpret this “sky cover” chart?

The image below is a screenshot of forecasted sky cover in percentage for various parts of Arizona. Is the sky cover percentage the percentage of each pixel that has cloud, or is it the percentage of ...
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### Topography and flash flooding

I'm looking for a study or document showing the effect of the topography, slopes, the sea level and the tide on flash flooding occurrence. Thanks in advance
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### What do the little flags on these martian wind speed data points mean?

According to this answer the weather at the InSight lander on Mars can now be seen online at https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/weather/ This includes the wind speed and I believe the direction (if that's ...
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### Rainbow dynamics?

How would steam refract light compared to fog and how would the rainbow appear? Does the temperature of the water drop or ice crystal effect the rainbow in any way? I know the size of the water drop ...
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### Why is convective precipitation associated with heavy rains?

Why is convective precipitation associated with heavy rains? As per wikipedia's page on Atmospheric Convection: "Moist convection leads to thunderstorm development, which is often responsible for ...