TV Forecasting in the Bay Area
If you go to my t-shirt shop, you’ll see a couple of shirts I made to represent San Francisco weather. My niece loves “The Horror! The Fog!”, because if you’re on the inland side of the coastal ranges, and you start to see the fog roll in, it can feel like a winter snow storm hitting on a summer day. San Francisco experiences heavy rains, thunderstorms, even snow on nearby mountaintops. During the summertime, forecasting high temperatures can be extremely difficult. You can forecast a high of 80 degrees, and the marine layer will move in, and your forecast high will be blown by 15 degrees! My friend Billy Poon, meteorologist at KPIX in San Francisco, helped me with this blog.
NWS Office San Francisco/Monterey Bay (I use this to check out the weather changes in the last 24 hours, surface pressure very important for forecasting shifts in winds. Wind shifts are not only important for marine forecasts in the Pacific and San Francisco Bay, but for fog forecasting as well.)
Weather Underground Bay Area Weather Sites (This map from Weather Underground shows all the personal weather stations available, much more than the local National Weather Service Office provides. Each station has a record of weather information.)
Unisys Weather Upper Air Models (Place I go to start on my 7-day forecast.)
GFS MOS Guidance (GFS MOS forecast guidance for temperatures around the Bay.)
NAM MOS Guidance (NAM MOS forecast guidance for temperatures.)
Raw FOUS Data (The FOUS… Billy uses this to check out the Relative Humidity at 3 levels, for Low, Mid & Highs clouds & rainfall over 60 hours.)
NWS San Francisco/Monterey Bay Weather Tables (This is a clickable map that will show 7-day model based weather forecast.)
Air Quality (Check the air quality for the day—big concern in the summertime.)
Airport Delays (Check for airport delays, especially San Francisco!)
Rainfall Forecast (Rainfall forecast broken down over 3 days, very fine detail. Billy says it’s a great tool during rainy season.)
California Department of Transportation – Road Conditions (Knowing the actual road conditions, can help you determine if you blew the rain/snow elevation on the roads leading up to Lake Tahoe!)
USGS Earthquake Map (And, of course in California, you will need this earthquake map from the USGS.)
Thanks Billy!
-Dawn Brown, Billy Poon, KPIX Meteorologist
What is the job of a television meteorologist?
The Magic of TV! Photo Courtesy Chris Meydrich
I’ll get to the picture in just a second. But, first, the job of a TV weather person depends on where you work. Some stations don’t even require that you are a meteorologist. They just want you to be able to communicate the weather forecast in a way that’s easy to understand, so the public knows what the weather will be like when they walk out the door. While the National Weather Service is the government agency in charge of forecasting the weather and issuing warnings when your life or property is threatened, they communicate those warnings through television stations. In places like New Orleans, most television stations require the weather person to have a degree in meteorology. Severe weather, in the form of flash flooding, damaging winds, or hail, can develop rapidly along the Gulf South. When I’m looking at a developing storm on radar, I have the ability to determine whether it has certain features that indicate the possibility of damaging winds, or even a tornado. Because weather conditions change so rapidly, TV weather people often stay up all night watching the weather, in case a thunderstorm becomes severe. (A yoga mat on the floor is very comfortable during an all-nighter.) The other fact that people are surprised about is that we make up our own forecasts. That’s why every station has a different forecast. We check the global computer models four times a day, and adjust our forecasts with the changing weather conditions (what’s going on outside), and what the computer models are showing us as well. It’s up to the experience of the individual meteorologist to look at the developing weather outside as well as use the most accurate computer model to produce the forecast. That’s a lot of mumbo jumbo to say it’s a takes a lot of work and experience to make a daily forecast, and it’s a new challenge every day. (My next blog answers the question: What is a computer weather model, and how do forecasters use them?) Most television meteorologists make their own computer graphics, put on their own makeup, choose their own clothes, and then go on TV! (Not as glamorous as it looks to most people I guess.)
Okay… so to the “green screen”! In the picture above, I am standing in front of the weather wall, (probably putting on my microphone.) When we are giving our forecasts, the screen in back of us is green. Through the magic of TV, the maps of the United States are made to look like they are on the wall behind us, even though they are just projected onto your television set, with the meteorologist in front. When it looks like we are turning toward the wall and pointing, we are actually looking at television monitors on each side of us, and in front of us. Stay tuned for more insider weather info… until next time!
Tips for the Gulf South TV Forecaster
Moving to a new TV market is tough. I’m putting together some of the most important websites you’ll need to hit the ground running. Good Luck! Since the Gulf South is driven in a large part by the tropics during the summertime, you will have many days of frustation before you begin to learn the patterns and the different small scale boundaries that can develop. Severe weather develops rapidly, especially in the fall, winter and spring. Even a summertime thunderstorm can cause flooding in the streets. Of course snow is not a common occurence, but if you get all the right ingredients, you will have a miracle snow day during a cold winter.
Looking at the radar and satellite, (if your shop doesn’t have what you need, go to the National Weather Service Eastern Region Headquarters and Aviation Weather) to get a general idea of the weather pattern.
Use your synoptic scale models (large scale models) to get storm placement, flow patterns, and 850 mb temperatures, and precipitation amounts (this is available at Unisys Weather), and make a short-term forecast. Look at atmospheric forecast soundings site, especially if thunderstorms are expected, to determine severity. Make sure you visit the Storm Prediction Center to see if you are in a risk category for thunderstorms.
Generally, your local NWS office can give you the risk of inland flooding due to repeated storms, but here’s a link to the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center – Inland Flooding in case that is a concern during repeated storm events or a tropical storm has moved inland.
Tides are extremely important for coastal communities, here’s a link to Tide Predictions for Gulf States. Marine and boating forecasters also generally use buoy data. NOAA Buoys Gulf of Mexico
Make an extended 7-day forecast using the latest and most complete suite of extended model runs (e.g. the GFS), available at NCEP Model Analyses and Forecasts.
Also, you’ll need a temperature forecast to compare all of your graphical data against for a highs/lows forecast. The best place to find MOS (Model Output Statistics) is Current NWS MOS Forecast Products.
When it comes to tropical weather, which can also often be a player, things can get even more interesting, here’s a link to my blog on Tracking Hurricanes.
Oh! One added note, sea fog can develop in the wintertime along the Gulf South. The NWS Office in New Orleans has a decision tree Sea Fog Forecasting to help you forecast a sea fog event in the wintertime. It’s fascinating!
Meet Dr. William Gray, Hurricane Forecaster
I met Dr. William Gray when he was in New Orleans for the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in January 2008. While we were walking along the infamous site of the 17th Street Canal levee break in Lakeview, a tour bus stopped to point him out. He waved, getting quite a chuckle out of his renown here along the Gulf South for his yearly seasonal hurricane outlooks. In Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives and does his research, he was always known as the Mayor’s husband. His wife Nancy (now deceased) was the one people were stopping to greet.
He wanted to be famous when he was young, but for slinging a baseball. “I wanted to be a pitcher,” Gray said.
His baseball dreams stunted by a knee injury, Gray graduated from George Washington University with a degree in geography. He was working on his masters when World War II intervened. Like other meteorologists of his generation, he was trained to forecast weather during the war. Gray was stationed in the middle of the Atlantic on the Azores, an island chain 900 miles off the coast of Portugal, providing forecasts for the Trans-Atlantic flights. At that time, there were no satellites and no computers. “I got a lot of good weather experience.”
At the end of the war, Gray decided to continue his career in meteorology under the tutelage of Dr. Herbert Riehl in Chicago, whom Gray calls the most prominent tropical meteorologist of his time. “The new National Hurricane Research Project had just been formed,” and so in 1958, Riehl and Gray began flying into the center of hurricanes. Dr. Gray wrote his Master/PhD thesis from the flight data gathered during these flights into the center of the storms, describing the internal structure of these storms.
In 1961, Dr. Herbert Riehl moved to Chicago, and offered Gray a job in his department at Colorado State University. Still based far from hurricane country, Gray began spending every summer in Florida, chasing hurricanes. But, there was one big problem. “We would go to Florida every year and wonder was this going to be an active season?”
Dr. Gray states the Atlantic Ocean Basin has the largest year to year variability when it comes to tropical cyclones. “Some years there just weren’t many storms, other years a whole lot of storms and the question is we couldn’t tell before the season. It was completely random.” Gray told me.
In the early part of the 1980s, after Dr. Gray had been flying into storms for 3 decades, he noticed a parallel between two data sets he had collected: the formation of El Nino in the Pacific Ocean and the lack of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean Basin. During an El Nino year, there would be less tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic Ocean. The term El Nino refers to the periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. For years, it’s mainly been the bane of the Western United States, because it can lead to flooding rains and mudslides. But, in the Atlantic, it leads to wind shear, and wind shear is bad for hurricanes. (Wind shear is a change in wind direction or speed with height.)
When Dr. Gray made the discovery back in the 1980s, it didn’t receive much attention because there weren’t very many storms. But in the last 15 years, the Southeastern United States has been hit by one devastating storm after another. And populations across the Eastern United States and Gulf of Mexico began waiting for his predictions and whether it spelled another active year, or a relatively quiet season. Nowadays, most of his research is done by Dr. Phil Klotzbach, the main author on the seasonal outlooks. Their research and outlook forecasts are much more complicated, based on worldwide weather patterns, and ocean temperatures around the globe.
And, he’s got competition. Forecasters at North Carolina State, the Weather Research Center in Houston, and European forecasters all put out a seasonal hurricane forecast, among others.
However, the official hurricane outlook published by NOAA at the beginning of hurricane season still most resembles the forecast parameters discovered by Dr. Gray.