Kevin Selle
Wichita Falls, TX
Male, 55
I've been a broadcast meteorologist on television since the early 1990's. Happy to answer any questions about the weather or local TV news. Yes, I often wear sneakers on set just out of view of the camera.
Complicated answer, Richard, but a good question. There are quite a few and I really can't give a number off the top of my head. Easily more than a dozen It is complicated because different models offer different solutions. Some are short range, some are longer range. Some are US based, others European and Canada and Japan. To further complicate the issue some models are run as "ensembles" meaning they are run from the basic initial data but small variations are introduced to give different solutions. The basic input data is collected twice a day from about 900 upper air sites, or weather balloons, launched twice a day, noon and midnight Greenwich mean time. The idea is to take a snapshot of the entire planet atmosphere at the same time. Also, more and more data, from satellites and radar for example, is now ingested into the models to varying degrees. A shorter answer is, on a regular day I'll look at three or four.
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Great question. National Weather Service folks take the tornado expirations very seriously and would most likely issue an extension for any risk. That said, rotation could certainly increase again. An extra five of ten minutes would be a reasonable course of action. I highly recommend a radar app called RadarScope for your phone. It allows you to locate yourself on the map and animate radar so you can see if a storm is moving toward or away from your location. Thank, Daniel.
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Great question. A cold air event, like the current one, is a good bit less complicated than rain or snow. With a precipitation forecast there are more factors at play. In general a forecast gets fuzzier the further out it time you go. Broadly speaking the forecast starts with data gathered from weather balloons launched twice a day from about 900 sites around the world. That sounds like a big number but when you consider the size of the earth, and how much of it is covered by water, which is hard to launch a balloon from, that data is pretty sparse. The goal of the balloons is to take a snapshot of the atmosphere at a given moment. It is a fuzzy picture. Think of putting that fuzzy picture on a copy machine. The copy is fuzzier, then make a copy of a copy and so on. So the further out in time the more errors or changes that enter the forecast. Stay warm!
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Yup. Sure can. Cold air moving into an area, cold air advection, can drop the temperature. And something called evaporative cooling can happen when it is raining. The friction with the air caused by falling raindrops can transfer heat to the water vapor and cool the air as well. Great question!
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Hi, Hal. Uneven heating of the atmosphere helps create air pressure differences. Mother Nature tries to equalize the imbalance and air moves from high to low. Since the earth rotates the air is subject to Coriolis force and the air is deflected from moving perpendicular to the isobars. Thanks! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force
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Hmmm...don't think so. Might be a question for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). I think they can levy fines.
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Hi, Kevin. I'm thinking you mean the Storm Attributes Table, IDs assigned to radar products. Take a look here and see if this is helpful. Thanks. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/radar-data/nexrad-products
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