Meteorology/Everyday Weather

General Info
Everday weather is what I would consider the most complex subject for meteorolgy mainly because it coverals all bases of meteology even some climate and storm systems There is a lot to know for this topic some of the major things are
 * Heat transport
 * Atmospheric Circulation patterns
 * Air masses
 * Fronts
 * Weather forcasting technology
 * Instuments
 * Phenomena

Heat Transport
Lets start of with Heat transport heat transport includes the energy budget,convection,radiation

The Earths energy budget is how the earth reflects absorbs and distributes energy from the sun.As you might know from climate the earths albedo is around 31%. For those who dont know the earhts albedo is how much solar radiation the earth reflects. 19% is obsorbed by clouds,and 51%is obsorbed by the earhts surface.



Convection and radiation are both types of energy transfer.

Convection is the transfer of heat by the actual movement of the warmed matter. This is the cause of movement of air in many places. Convection causes warm air to rise and cool air to fall.This ties into most atmospheric circulation patterns like the trhee cell model. The hadley cell has warm air by the equator so it rises and than falls as it cools creating a circulation patterns Also convection cause sea and land breezes. A image of convection



Radiation
 * Electromagnetic waves that directly transport energy through space this is how the earth can be warmed from the sun.

Air Masses and Winds
An Air mass is a large body of air that has similar moisture and temperature properties throughout the air mass.There are two main air masses that influence weather in the United States and Canada. These air masses are Continental Polar and Maritime Tropical.
 * Continental Polar
 * Originate over Canada
 * Cold
 * Cause of weather during winter months
 * Maritime Tropical
 * Originate over Gulf of Mexico
 * Warm
 * What gives Texas a warm winter

Fronts
Five Types
 * 1) Stationary Front
 * 2) Cold Front
 * 3) Warm Front
 * 4) Occluded Front
 * 5) Dry Line


 * 1) Stationary Fronts
 * 2) forms when a warm/cold front stops moving
 * 3) noticeable temperature change and/or shift in wind direction is normally observed when you cross from one side of the front to the other
 * 4) Cold front
 * 5) Area where cold air is replacing warm air
 * 6) Air cold and dry
 * 7) Normally fast moving
 * 8) Warm Front
 * 9) Warm moist Air
 * 10) Area Where warm air is replacing cold air
 * 11) Occluded Front
 * 12) where a cold front meets a warm front
 * 13) normally formed by a cyclone
 * 14) Dry line
 * 15) moisture boundary
 * 16) commonly found just east of the Rocky Mountains
 * 17) extremely rare east of the Mississippi River

Clouds
For the event you need to be able to identify clouds and weather that come with each cloud. Cloud prefixes tell you where the clouds are located.

"cirr-",like cirrus clouds,can be located at high levels

"alto-",like altostratus,can be found at middle levels

Cloud types are classifies by height of the ground these are three of the classifications This is a list identifying which clouds go in which layer I found from "The cloud book how to understand the skies" by Richard Hamblyn
 * Upper Clouds
 * 9000 meters
 * Cirus clouds
 * Intermediate Clouds
 * 3000-7000 meters
 * Altocumulus
 * Lower Clouds
 * 2000 meters
 * Nimbostratus
 * High Fogs
 * Under 1000 meters
 * 1) Low Clouds
 * 2) Stratocumulus
 * 3) Stratus
 * 4) Cumulus
 * 5) Cumulonimbus
 * 6) Medium Clouds
 * 7) Altocumulus
 * 8) Altostratus
 * 9) Nimbostratus
 * 10) High clouds
 * 11) Cirrus
 * 12) Cirrocumulus
 * 13) Cirrstratus

Great Cloud page http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/cld/cldtyp/home.rxml

Great Cloud book is"The cloud book how to understand the skies" by Richard Hamblyn



Forcasting
There are many ways to forecast but the simplest way is to take todays weather and say that tomorrow is going to be the same this can be called the PErsistance method

The next method can be called the trends method it relies on mathematics to get the forecast. this method involves being able to get a accurate measerment of the speed at which the weather system is moving and plugging the numbers into the speed formula (S=d/t) and determining the time at which the system will be at your position here is an example of the trend model

The Climatology Method is another easy way of forecasting. This method involves averaging weather statistics accumulated over many years to make a forecast.

The Analog Method is a more complicated method of producing a forecast. It involves examining today's forecast scenario and remembering a day in the past when the weather scenario looked very similar. Than you would predict that the weather in this forecast will behave similar to the day int he past.

Phenomena
There are many weather phenomena here they are the major ones
 * 1) Mirages- occur when light is refracted to produce an image of an object or the sky where it is not.
 * 2) Haloes-Like rainbows, haloes are formed around the Sun due to moisture being refracted from the Sun�s rays in the upper atmosphere.
 * 3) Belt of Venus- occurs during dusty evenings when a band of pinkish or brownish sky will appear between the sky and the horizon.
 * 4) Aurora Borealis-charged particles from the Sun that have reached the Earth�s upper atmosphere and become excited
 * 5) Mammatus Clouds-are often associated with a storm front
 * 6) St Elmo�s Fire-s luminous plasma that appears like fire on objects, such as the masts of ships or lightning rods, in an area that is electrically charged during a thunderstorm
 * 7) Green Ray-occurs very briefly before total sunset and after sunrise.
 * 8) Fire Rainbow-A fire rainbow is an extremely rare phenomenon that occurs only when the sun is high allowing its light to pass through high-altitude cirrus clouds with a high content of ice crystals.

How To read weather maps/satellite imagery
we are going to start of with the very basic weather map the kind that you will most likely see at competition
 * 1) start by identifying the different pressure zones on the map above it is already done but if it wasn't marked look for sections that have a circle with a very high or low pressure
 * 2) Look for fronts this can be done by looking at the station ball symbols(those are the yellow circles with the tails the tails indicate wind direction) look and find a sudden change in wind direction/pressure that will normally indicate a front i marked where i believe a front to be.

Links
This is a great meteorology site and some of the images on this page have come from it http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/home.rxml