HOW DO METEOROLOGISTS FORECAST THE WEATHER?


          As everyone knows, predicting the weather can often be difficult. Professional weather forecasters, called meteorologists, use information collected by weather stations on land, at sea and on satellites in space. Rainfall, sunshine and wind speed can all be measured fairly easily, but they only tell us what the weather is like now. A better gauge of future weather is to study air pressure and cloud formation. Today's meteorologists use computers to help make sense of all the information received and to predict, based on past events, the weather of the future.



          ‘Observations’ are the readings of the weather that we take—not only quantities like air pressure, temperature and rainfall at the surface, but measurements in the upper atmosphere from weather balloons and aircraft, and also data from weather radars and satellites. Together, these observations of many different elements that make up the weather paint a picture of how it has been recently, and how it is right now. This information is critical—to forecast the weather into the future, we need to know where to start from!



          Computer Weather models, or technically, ‘numerical weather prediction’ models, are the main tools we use to forecast the weather. In a nutshell, they take all of the mathematical equations that explain the physics of the atmosphere and calculate them at billions of points within the atmosphere around the Earth. The weather models require enormous computing power to complete their calculations in a reasonable amount of time, meaning they use some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world—our supercomputer, for example, can handle more than 1600 trillion calculations per second! The models take the past and current weather observations of the atmosphere and ocean as the starting point, and plug them into the mathematical equations that calculate the weather into the future.



          Meteorologists are able to predict the changes in weather patterns by using several different tools. They use these tools to measure atmospheric conditions that occurred in the past and present, and they apply this information to create educated guesses about the future weather. Always remember that a weather forecast is an educated guess – meteorologists (and mankind, in general) cannot control the weather. The best we can do is observe past and present atmospheric patterns and data, and apply this information to what we think will happen in the future. Meteorologists use the scientific method on a daily – and even hourly – basis!




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ARE WEATHER AND CLIMATE THE SAME THING?


          The lower levels of the Earth’s atmosphere are in constant motion. As the atmosphere heats and cools, it expands and contracts, causing changes in pressure and air movement. These changes cause the weather that we experience on Earth. The daily occurrence of sunshine, rain, hail, snow, fog or wind is what we call weather.



          Climate is the overall weather in a particular area over a longer period of time. Weather, as in a weather forecast, refers to short-term conditions in the atmosphere in a particular location or region.



          Climate, on the other hand, describes the average daily weather for extended periods, such as if winters are cold and snowy or if summers are hot and humid, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Basically, climate is the average weather pattern in an area over a longer period of time, and weather patterns, according to NOAA, are caused by the flow in atmosphere. 



          “Weather is the mix of events that happen each day in our atmosphere,” NOAA reported. Although there is just one atmosphere on Earth, the weather is different around the world and changes over minutes, hours, days and weeks. A given area may experience a warm winter, or maybe a wet month or even a rainy decade, but that variance are still weather-related.



          So, one of the main differences between weather and climate is time, with weather referring to a short span of time and climate referring to longer-range weather patterns in a region, generally over 30 years or more. “While weather can change dramatically in a single location from day to day (for example, cold and rainy one day, followed by hot, dry conditions the next day), climate generally changes less quickly because it represents the average of weather conditions over a longer period of time,” according to the American Geosciences Institute.



          There are generally five types of climate, including dry, temperate, tropical, continental and polar. It’s hotter near the equator, for example, so locations closest to the equator have a more tropical climate, while areas closest to the Arctic and Antarctic have a polar climate. When it comes to weather, National Geographic reports, there are six main components: temperature, wind, humidity, atmospheric pressure, precipitation and cloud cover. Weather can includes all kinds of conditions, such as sunshine, rain, hail, snow, flooding, blizzards, thunderstorms, heat waves and more.



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