AOSC 123 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Numerical Weather Prediction, World Meteorological Organization

• School: University of Maryland
• Department: Atmospheric and Oceanic Science
• Course: AOSC 123
• Professor: rachelpinker

Document Summary

Model: a conceptual qualitative description of a system that provides some understanding of how the system works but does not allow one to describe its detailed behavior. Weather: refers to the activity over short periods of time (hours or days: numerical weather prediction models are used to predict the weather. Climate: average atmospheric conditions over significantly longer periods of time. Weather prediction: present conditions must be known. Global network of land based station ships and radiosondes. Methods of forecast: statistical/empirical forecasts, numerical models, man/machine mk (subjective forecast) Model grids: constant grid spacing in latitude and longitude is a unit for which information is collected to represent what is happening in the grid on an average, models are implemented on a grid. Ensemble models: any single run of the climate model represents only one of a range of possible outcomes. They can be averaged to give a single ensemble mean.