Review: Making Specific Forecasts
Page Last modified: 22 December 2003
- Each geographic region has key local forecast situations.
    We showed 8 examples for the lower Sacramento valley.
- There are other significant weather situations that occur
elsewhere.
    We discussed 7 examples in general terms.
- Forecasts involve:
- An educated and organized look at the guidance.
(Selecting which guidance to examine.)
- Then an interpretation of that guidance by combining two
collections of knowledge, one "theoretical" and the other
"empirical"
- What types of quantities, structures, etc. are important to
look for? For example, we mentioned
- locations of trough axes; maxima in vorticity, etc.
- whether there is PVA or NVA; WAA or CAA
- shape of the trough (implying direction of motion)
- soundings for potential instability, etc.
- What does a particular pattern mean when you see it?
This was the intent behind showing example patterns. For example:
- recognizing characteristic patterns for significant
weather conditions.
- sleuthing out why the model produces precip where it
does: is it frontal? is it from an upper level
disturbance? convective? lake-effect? orographic lifting?
low-level convergence zone? (a combination of the these?)
- deducing features not plotted by model output (especially
locating where the fronts are in the forecast output)
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