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Category Archives: Meteorology
What are good weather apps for smart phones?
Good weather apps for smart phones provide easy access to current weather and forecasts. Many apps tell you about the high temperature for the day and can provide an hour-by-hour breakdown of temperatures, chance and type of precipitation, air quality and other weather information.
Your device likely comes with an installed weather app, but consider exploring other apps. Apps that include live weather radar and any severe weather alerts for your area are valuable. They are useful for identifying precipitation and storm location and movement. Many include lightning flash locaters, too. Apps with current weather radar data provide useful information when you need to be outside and precipitation is in the area. Continue reading
How is visibility distance evaluated for a weather map?
The weather observing stations of the National Weather Service operate in fully automatic mode and have sensors that measure visibility.
These instruments sense the forward scattering characteristics of light to measure the extinction coefficient of a high intensity beam directed at a volume of air close to the sensor. This provides an accurate measurement over a range of visibilities. The use of light within the visible spectrum also allows the sensor to simulate human perception of visibility. Continue reading
What is latent heat?
Since the beginning of the 2023-24 snow season, Madison and Dane County have received approximately 32 inches of snow.
Snow is a form of solid water, and water is the only substance that occurs naturally in all three phases — solid, liquid and invisible gas — in the Earth’s atmosphere. Of course, that means that the 32 inches of snow began as the equivalent amount of water in the invisible vapor (gas) phase before it transformed into solid water. Continue reading
Are drones used in meteorology?
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have been used to make weather observations for half a century. Over the past decade there has been a wider application of drones in meteorology due in part to technological developments.
Drones can provide critical research observations of weather systems. For about a decade, NOAA has partnered with NASA to fly the Global Hawk high-altitude unmanned aircraft to observe and study how hurricanes form and intensify. High-resolution photographs from low-flying drones are used to understand and document wind and flood damage associated with severe weather. They also help to better assess storm intensity based on the damage. Continue reading
Is there any difference between ‘partly cloudy’ and ‘partly sunny’?
The National Weather Service denotes sky condition using the portion of sky covered by opaque cloud cover.
In meteorology, an okta is a unit of measurement used to describe the amount of cloud cover at a given location. Cloud conditions are estimated in terms of how many eighths of the sky are covered with opaque cloud, ranging from 0 oktas (completely clear sky) to 8 oktas (completely overcast). It does not include transparent clouds, such as thin cirrus. Continue reading
Category: Meteorology
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