Contents

Idea

This page is about meteorology, the study of the atmosphere and short term weather forecasting.

Details

Scales

Meteorology is subdivided into specialist field concentrating on phenomena at certain length scales $L$. There are different classifications, a simple one is this:

• microscale: $\lt$ 20 km

• mesoscale: 20 km $\lt$ L $\lt$ 1000 km

• synoptic (large) scale: L $\gt$ 1000 km

Forecast Validation

Forecast validation is an important topic in meteorology, since a huge part of the subject is concerned with prediction more or less extraordinary weather events. For more details, see

• I. T. Jolliffe and David B. Stephenson: Forecast verification: a practitioner’s guide in atmospheric science (John Wiley and Sons, 2003)

Computational and Implementation Issues

Computational meteorology relies heavily on Computational fluid dynamics.

Parameterization

Numerical weather models? are usually grid models?, so that there are usually a lot of important processes that cannot be incorporated into the model directly, because they evolve on a sub-grid scale. Therefore, these processes are approximated by additional parameetrizations, that are influences that act on the model on each grid and depend on a certain set of parameters. For more details, see

• David J. Stensrud: Parameterization schemes: Keys to Understand Numerical Weather Prediction Models (Camebridge 2007)

References

General

• Wikipedia: Meteorology

Introductory Textbooks

• C.Donald Ahrens: Meteorology Today (Brooks Cole; 9 edition (July 2, 2008)

Computational Meteorology and Weather Models

• Wilford Zdunkowski and Andreas Bott: Dynamics of the Atmosphere: A Course in Theoretical Meteorology (Cambridge University Press (April 28, 2003)

Organizations

• UCAR, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research provides for example software and data, like NetCFD