Weather and Climate Forecasting

نویسندگان

  • Mark S. Roulston
  • Leonard A. Smith
چکیده

The Biblical quotation above is an ancient example of attempting to make meteorological predictions based on empirical observations. The idea it contains tends to work as a forecasting scheme, and it has been expressed in many different ways in the subsequent 2,000 years. it is one of many sayings and rhymes of folklore that provide a qualitative description of the weather. In the 17th century, the introduction of instruments to measure atmospheric variables meant that meteorology became a quantitative science. By the 19th century meteorological data was being collected all over Europe. It was during the 1800s that many scientists began lamenting the fact that the collection of meteorological data had far outpaced attempts to analyse and understand this data (Lempfert 1932). Attempts had been to find patterns in tables of meteorological, but these had usually ended in failure. One example is the efforts to link weather to celestial motions made by the Palatine Mteorological Society of Mannheim (the World's first such society) in the late 18th century. The breakthrough came when scientists began plotting the growing meteorological database on maps; the tendency of mid-latitude low-pressure systems to advance eastward was discovered: clouds in the west provide a red sky at dawn before bringing bad weather, clouds in the east redden the sky at sunset before making way for clear skies. The discovery of mid-latitude eastward flow not only explained the success of ancient folk wisdom, combined with the telegraph it also provided a means to extend predictability beyond the horizon. The late 19th and early 20th century saw many efforts to identify cycles in time series of weather data. One the most prolific cycle seekers, and ultimately one of the few successful ones, was Sir Gilbert Walker. Walker collated global weather data and spent years seeking correlations (Walker 1923, 1924, 1928, 1937, Walker and Bliss 1932) During this work he discovered that the pressure i,n Tahiti and in Darwin were anti-correlated. This discovery withstood the subsequent tests and is called the "Southern Oscillation". It is now known to be the atmospheric component of El Nine-Southern Oscillation climate phenomenon. Many other claims for the existence of weather cycles were made, but few withstood the scrutiny of statistical tests of robustness. By the 1930s, mainstream meteorology had largely given up attempting to forecast the state of the atmosphere using statistical approaches based solely on data (Nebeker 1995). Since then, estimates of the recurrence time of the atmosphere have implied that globally

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Weather , Climate , and Hydrologic Forecasting for the Southwest U

....................................................................................................................................... 8 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 8 Weather Forecasts ....................................................................................................

متن کامل

Weather, climate, and farmers: an overview

Challenges in linking meteorological and climatological information with a wide range of farming decisions are addressed in this paper. In particular, while a considerable amount of weather and climate information is now available for farmers, some types of information under development or already operational, particularly climate forecasting, formation, may be ill-suited for use by farmers for...

متن کامل

Soft Computing Techniques for Weather and Climate Change Studies

The Weather is a continuous, data-intensive, multidimensional, dynamic process that makes weather forecasting a formidable challenge. Weather forecasting involves predicting how the present state of the atmosphere will change. Climate is the long-term effect of the sun's radiation on the rotating earth's varied surface and atmosphere. The Day-byday variations in a given area constitute the weat...

متن کامل

CWRF Ready for Climate Service

The CWRF has been developed as the Climate extension of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF, Skamarock et al. 2008) by incorporating numerous improvements in representation of physical processes and integration of external (top, surface, lateral) forcings that are crucial to climate scales, including interactions between land–atmosphere–ocean, convection–microphysics and cloud–aeros...

متن کامل

Development of the Regional Climate-Weather Research and Forecasting (CWRF) Model: Surface Boundary Conditions

Front Cover: The figure illustrates the geographic distribution of the USGS land-cover categories based on the AVHRR satellite 1-km resolution data.

متن کامل

Weather, climate, and hydrologic forecasting for the US Southwest: a survey

As part of a regional integrated assessment of climate vulnerability, a survey was conducted from June 1998 to May 2000 of weather, climate, and hydrologic forecasts with coverage of the US Southwest and an emphasis on the Colorado River Basin. The survey addresses the types of forecasts that were issued, the organizations that provided them, and techniques used in their generation. It reflects...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2013