# 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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46 views

### Thunderstorm Frequency Depending on the Year [closed]

Why is it that some years have significantly more thunderstorms than others while other years have significantly less? For example, in 2008, there were 15 thunderstorm days in Asheville but above 40 ...
65 views

### Color of Sunsets

I heard that hot weather in the summer makes the pastel colors of the sunset sky more vivid and more red? Is this true? But I also heard that in the winter, the colors of the sunset sky are brighter ...
60 views

### Why do the highest temperature levels occur at midday?

I also see that weather forecast sites show temperatures decreasing starting from 3 to 4 pm, but the thermometer shows that it starts droping at sunset.
70 views

### Are rainbows a reaction from earths natural release of gas after a rain? [closed]

In my studies, Ive dropped a limestone or porous stone into water, with salt and sugar. The results where an impressive light show of color flashes. With the Earths natural release of gas, these ...
1k views

### Why did a branch against a window prevent condensation?

Last night was pretty chilly here in South East Queensland, Australia. We woke this morning to condensation on the bedroom windows but noticed something curious. Where a small branch was touching the ...
72 views

### Why are temperatures within a few degrees of the all-time high actually pretty common?

I see from a news report that the all-time high temperature, anywhere on Earth, is 129 F. But temperatures within 10 degrees of that record are not rare, and temperatures within 20 degrees are pretty ...
42 views

### How much helium should I put in a weather balloon? [closed]

I have an 8 foot diameter weather balloon and I plan to launch it into near space. I was hoping someone out there in this community would know about weather balloons. My payload will problably weigh ...
67 views

### Wind speed data plot contains blank gaps

I am relatively new to Python, and I am having trouble plotting some data. Specifically, I am plotting wind speed data on a 2-D plot that I grabbed from the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) ...
73 views

### In meteorology, are satellite data “better” than reanalysis data?

More specifically, can it be argued that satellite data are more reliable because they are direct measurements of physical quantities, while reanalysis data depend on the processing and merging of ...
88 views

### Why are there both climate regions from axial tilt and weather cells?

So Earth has an axial tilt and that creates weather regions. For example, approximately 23 degrees north and south, approximately the same as the planets axial tilt, will give you the tropics. This ...
32 views

### Books / resources on measurement methods in atmospheric sciences

I have found this very long book from weather.gov (free access) Guide to Meteorological Instruments and Methods of Observation which might be a bit too in-depth for what I'm looking for, so I was ...
95 views

### Understanding the color coding of a weather map

I came across an infrared weather map like this I couldn't find any legend on the colorbar's color convention. Initially, I thought that might be the color for reflected light's wavelength, but there ...
74 views

### What CRS does GFS use?

I'm trying to reproject GRIB data from NOAA forecasts onto other data using Python and the pygrib and proj packages (among many others). What is the proper Proj string for GFS GRIBs? The projection ...
92 views

### How/where is randomness/stochasticity used in weather prediction

I am seeking information on how weather models use randomness (if at all). From what I can gather daily weather forecasting uses partial differential equations with initial and boundary conditions ...
111 views

### Total differentiation

The local derivative is linked to the total derivative by: $\frac{\partial T}{\partial t} = \frac{DT}{Dt} - \mathbf{U} \cdot \nabla T$ and the -$\mathbf{U} \cdot \nabla T$ term represent the change ...
71 views

### Is pollution the reason why rainbows are so rare nowadays?

Today I saw a rainbow after almost a decade. I live in Noida (a city) in India. Most people I know believe that: we don't see rainbows nowadays because of pollution and now after nearly 3 months since ...
47 views

### What is the relationship between the derivatives of specific volume and potential temperature with height?

While studying about atmospheric waves, I found a passage in my book in which a equation involved the term $$\frac{1}{\alpha }\frac{\partial \alpha }{\partial z}$$ where $\alpha$ is the specific ...
51 views

### Why some area in the ocean seems to have like “wind barrier”?

When looking at the earth wind map, some lines clearly distinguish themselve and act as "frontier" between stream of wind. I was wondering what it was and what was causing them? Thanks.
36 views

### Rainbowish phenomenon outside my home

I took a photo of an amazing sight I had never seen outside my home ( southern india ) but I could not tell if it was a rainbow type thing or an aurora borealis. Also if it was to be a sun dog , ...
19 views

### Noise level estimation using Hildebrand & Sekhon method

I have some data from a radar to process in order to find the moments and in turn the wind speeds. I have no prior knowledge in signal processing so it's giving me a hard time to estimate the noise ...
62 views

### Torrential rain from a tiny cloud in otherwise blue sky [closed]

In the 1950s in England in an otherwise cloudless blue sky in summer a very small dense cloud appeared overhead around midday which looked like cumulus and for about 5 minutes we had torrential rain. ...
50 views

### Providing Edgar emission using prep_chem_source for tracers (CO2-CH4)

I am working on CO2 and CH4 by WRF-CHEM, for providing my anthropogenic emission from Edgar data base, I'm going to use the Prep_chem_source App. I would like to use Edgar data emission (as my ...
238 views

### What is the explanation of using pressure units (hPa) to express height when dealing with wind speeds?

I am trying to understand how prevailing winds and jet stream currents are formed and how they are varying in speed and direction. When looking at different wind speeds at different altitudes on ...
60 views

### How does the changing seasons affect the large scale easterly flow of the ITCZ?

I am new to climate science and have been learning the basic picture of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) and how this leads to the predominant easterly "trade winds". The picture that I ...
125 views

### If I build a concrete surface on a 1km x 1km area and painted it black, will I create convection (updraft from ground)?

Providing there are low wind conditions and a clear sky, will the 1 km x 1 km black surface create an upward convention? Let’s say I were to do this at 60$^\circ$ N longitude in march month, the ...
31 views

### Effect on climate of the Earth’s rotation was a week instead of 24 hours

Cross-posted in Worldbuilding. Curious what the affects on daily temperatures and climate would be if the Earth had a slower rotation, say 84 hours of light and 84 hours of darkness. How extreme ...
64 views

### Why does Panama have a dry season?

So, I understand that during much of the year, Panama gets regular rain due to moist air being carried in by the trade winds from the Caribbean. However, the country also has a "dry season" from ...
56 views

### Is it meaningful to assume static pressure to be constant along a streamline?

I am looking at Bernoulli's equation formulated in two dimensions, which reads $$\frac{v^2}{2}+c_p\theta_0\pi+gz \equiv \mathrm{const.}$$ along a given streamline $\gamma$, where $v=|\mathrm{v}|$ for ...
124 views

### What are these lines that I frequently see on doppler radar?

I frequently see lines like this (the red arrows in the image below point to what I am referring to) on doppler radars. They are usually propagating outward from a line of thunderstorms. What are they,...
64 views

### If its ice sheet were removed under modern atmospheric conditions, what climatic and ice-sheet equilibrium would be re-established over Antarctica?

Note the use of the term removed instead of melted—as in, any excess water is moved to where it can't cause trouble, either through the use of advanced technology (space elevators, et cetera) or for ...
53 views

### How do they determine the “feels like” temperatures for weather data?

I'm pulling air temperature and other weather stats from various APIs. There's this concept called "feels like temperature", separate from "actual temperature". Apparently, this is the temperature ...
654 views

### How much does COVID-19 affect weather forecasts?

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is concerned about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the quantity and quality of weather observations and forecasts, as well as atmospheric and climate ...
79 views

### How to search for the nearest non nan value in 2d xarray dataset

I have a 2d xarray dataset and I am having several nan values in the dataset. These nan values need to be filled with the nearest non-nan values in the 2d array. How do I do this? I am trying to ...
40 views

### What is the “forecast hour of product”

The NCEP website describes the file naming format of the GFS forecast data. https://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/pmb/products/gfs/ What does "forecast hour of product" mean?
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### Ice Water Content from GFS file

I am working my way through this paper: http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2017/8707234.pdf Equations 10 and 11 require the ice water content. I can't find it in the GFS grib2 file ...
41 views

### Digital alternative to hand analyzed maps

I am a staunch believer in the benefit of hand analyzing maps to get a good feel for the state of the atmosphere before getting into my forecast. With Covid-19 keeping us out of the office, one of the ...
49 views

### How will air quality, weather and climate improve because of the containment, social distancing and lockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak?

The actions taken to contain the corona-virus epidemic is closing any form of human activities in the world. Schools are closed in most cities of the world, people are told to stay at home and it ...
14 views

### How can I create netcdf file from my emission data in wrfinput_d01 format

I have some emission data files in netcdf format in diffrent files. I would like to write them in netcdf file as my wrfchemi_d01 to use them for runing wrf_chem. How can I create netcdf file from my ...
259 views

### Why is the pressure on the poles higher in Summer and lower in Winter?

Just to give context, this was not my original question but one that I ended up stuck with while trying to find a cause for the following observation (which is almost universally true for temperate ...
264 views

### “steep slope” when cold fronts encounter warm fronts: Confusing sentence in textbook

I'm currently reading a university textbook on processes that result in rainfall events. In the current processes, I'm reading there is a cold front that basically pushes warm air upwards which ...
56 views

### Why does exhaust smells linger some days?

Some days I can smell bad smelling exhaust 50 meters or more away from the bus stop. I think the air is usually moist those days. Does exhaust gases linger longer if the air is moist near the ground?...
45 views

### can wet winters require more home heating than colder winters, in same place?

This winter in UK has been wet and windy but rarely below freezing. Last winter was colder with snow but less rain and wind. My storage heating seems to need to be set higher this year. I suspect the ...
44 views

### Longitudes and latitudes are not regular in WRF-out files

I am working by WRF-ouput files (wrfout_d01_2016-01-16_00:00:00). I extracted and printed latitude and longitude data from the "wrfout_d01_2016-01-16_00:00:00", ...
63 views

### How can I do cdo remapbil

Can anyone to help me? I am trying to use this command to interpolate my netcdf data into my wrfinput_d01 . I have used this: ...
36 views

### Is this what is meant by a phenological season?

I’ve often thought there were three ways to define the seasons. I’ll use spring as an example. The first are the astronomical seasons, which is what calendars show and in my example would be the date ...
4k views

### Why are the clouds white and Australia black in weather satellite infrared images?

The question Is the sunlight on the GOES-16 Imagery reaching from the east? shows a visible light image and so in the night areas the Earth appears dark and in the day areas the Earth is a bit ...
161 views

### Is the sunlight on the GOES-16 Imagery reaching from the east?

I was wondering is the sunlight reaching from the general direction east? I came to this conclusion because the image is so dark on the west side however I am not 100% sure.
77 views

### Was this spherical device used in weather forecasting in the 1960's?

The New York Times obituary Robert M. White, Who Revolutionized Weather Forecasts, Dies at 92 shows the image below. It looks like it might be a model of the Earth but I can't tell for sure. Can the ...