Love Quiet Mondays
Texas Rainfall (courtesy NWS)
Texas and Louisiana will begin to dry out after a weeks worth of storms dumped more than 10″ of rain in portions of Central Texas and Southern Louisiana. The area of low pressure generating those storms is slowly moving to the Northeast, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area is still getting hit this Monday. Coastal areas are beginning to see a break, but northern Mississippi and Alabama will be the latest victims of this slow moving system before it finally loses steam.
Grey skies across Southern California as a cold front sweeps through. Although beachgoers may not like it, the cooler temperatures are a welcome weather treat this time of year, at a time when wildfires, driven by Santa Ana winds are fed by the hot temperatures in September and October.
It is a quiet Monday across the country, and silent in the tropics as well. We can ease into the workweek.
For a couple of days now, I’ve been meaning to show you an article I saw on Smart Money magazine online. It’s about the fallacy of the 7-day forecast. The author of the article seems to be “revealing” to people that extended forecasts aren’t very good, but I don’t think any forecaster, including the ones he interviews, argues that they are! Television weathercasters give you the 7-day forecast because the computer models go out 10 days. After about three days, the forecast tends toward climatology. But, sometimes, climatology is correct. What I like about this article is the meteorologists give you the limitations of todays forecasting. What I don’t like about the article is the innuendo that weather forecasters “won’t tell you” the limitations of their forecasting, when he has several meteorologists in the interview giving him the “inside information”. Oh, and the Doppler radar does do a good job during a storm of helping the on-air meteorologist forecast the immediate weather event for the next couple of hours. It also helps the forecaster determine whether a storm is severe, and if the public needs to be warned. Here’s the link to the article:
-Dawn Brown
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 TV Forecaster in the Northeast
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!
Forecasting in the Northeast can be overwhelming, especially if you start in the middle of winter! You could be dealing with lake effect snow, ice storms, sleet, freezing rain and blizzards! Here are some of the best web links to get your forecast off the computer and on the air.
After 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), follow these steps to make a forecast:
Take a look at Unisys Weather at your synoptic scale models to get storm placement, flow patterns, and 850 mb temperatures (this is available at Unisys Weather). Unisys also has the local Skew-T’s, but forecast soundings are also available here.
After you’ve figured out what’s going on in the larger scale, you can get down to the more nitty-gritty mesoscale (especially for lake-effect and even rain/snow lines). What I typically use for this is a tool called BUFKIT which is available at Buffalo, NY National Weather Service for download along with the required data sets.
Also, especially good for lake-effect snow, is the MM5 model, which is available at SUNY Stony Brook MM5 Mesoscale Forecasts.
To wrap this up and get a good idea of the next 7 days of weather, a good standby for the latest and most complete suite of extended model runs (e.g. the GFS) is NCEP Model Analyses and Forecasts.
Of course, you’ll also 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.
If you’d like to learn more about forecasting lake-effect snow or other winter weather phenomena, check out this website MetEd Home Page and become a member.
Another great option is to check out Haby Hints, developed by meteorologist Jeff Haby from Mississippi State University. You can go to his website and search for pretty much any weather term, and get an easy explanation of how to predict and forecast weather.
Happy forecasting!