Spring cleaning seems in order and with one sweep of the broom, IM notes two NWS office moves. The Aviation Weather Center has just recently moved to a new facility (described below) and the Denver NWS Forecast Office will move on May 10, 1999, from the Stapleton Airport location to the NOAA Boulder campus. The WSR-88D stays in its current location except for the Radar Products Generator which moves to Boulder.
I have posted two April technical attachments (TA's) from the libraries of the central and western region. Western Region TA 86-15 examines the kinematics related to frontogenesis through deformation of the flow field. Central Region TA 95-07 reviews annually recurring precipitation cycles in North Dakota.
By referring to Technical Procedures Bulletin 447 in the last edition, I may have inferred that there was currently a 06 UTC eta run available. There is not one...yet. Currently, output from the 03 UTC eta run is available. NCEP hopes for a move to a 06z eta run in the June/July time frame this summer.
The Tool Command Language (TCL) Weather Calculator is a stand alone Windows application, tested on both Windows 95 and 98, available from the Western Region on their Local Software Applications web page. TCL Weather Calculator calculates weather-related variables in a variety of unit combinations and easily converts from one unit to another. One unique feature of this particular weather calculator is that the graphical user interface program consists entirely of sliding scales. Point to http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/wrhq/LSA/lsa-49/.
On March 24, 1999, the AWC completed its move to a new facility collocated with the National Weather Service Training Center near the Kansas City International Airport north of Kansas City, Missouri. For more information on the move and the upcoming dedication ceremony, point to AWC's home page at http://www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/index.html.
An article in the Autumn 1998 issue of the NWS Aviation Weather Center (AWC) Newsletter (AWCommunications) by AWC meteorologist Donald W. McCann reviews an experimental objective procedure that diagnoses the initiation of thunderstorm convection using numerical output. VVSTORM uses vertical velocity fields generated by model output to predict possible areas of thunderstorm development. The VVSTORM algorithm first computes zones of lifting from vertical motions in three ways: frontogenesis, frictional pumping, and model forecasts of vertical motions. Studies have shown that actual vertical motions are 10-200 times the vertical velocities computed from numerical grids in any of these three ways. Dependent on the grid resolution, VVSTORM multiplies the vertical velocity factor; producing an estimate of the maximum possible "real" vertical velocity. VVSTORM's success depends on the numerical model's ability to forecast the environment. Maps of VVSTORM maximum vertical velocity calculated from the RUC model runs are posted on the web at: http://www.awc-kc.noaa.gov/awc/convcn.html. The article that describes the VVSTORM algorithm is also on line at:
FAMPA73 is a DOS based PC program which reads and plots the areas outlined by the NWS's Aviation Weather Center Airmets, Sigmets and Convective Sigmets. Recent upgrades provided by AWC programmers now read and plot Center Weather Advisories (CWA's) which, since March 1, 1999, have new advisory reference points. The documentation and software can be downloaded from the IM software home page at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/im/software.htm.
In a paper appearing in the current issue of Nature, scientists at NOAA's Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory say that ozone depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have declined about 3% overall since 1994. The reduction appears mainly due to the rapid destruction of methyl chloroform, a chemical previously used as a cleaning solvent, by natural atmospheric processes. However, the NOAA scientists go on to say that the global atmospheric content of a few other ozone depleting chemicals continues to increase. You will find a full summary of the article in a press release on the web at http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/. Even more information is available on NOAA's Climate Diagnostics Laboratory web site at http://www.cmdl.noaa.gov/noah/.
NASA scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies report in Science magazine that variations in the energy given off from the sun affect the Earth's stratospheric wind patterns and eventually the climate. The link between the 11 year solar cycle and the Earth's weather is something scientists have tried to understand for decades. Previous studies had concluded that changes in the solar output over solar cycle seemed to be too small to have much direct impact at the Earth's surface. For a summary of the article by the author Drew Shindell, point to http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/intro/shindell.03/.
Initially available in 1991, FERRET is a computer application tool to meet visualization needs of both oceanographers and meteorologists. Designed at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, FERRET integrates data management, analysis, and visualization through a high level of programming automation. The user has direct control of the data free from the concerns of managing data and graphic resources. At the same time FERRET provides the user with a significant amount of flexibility in graphic visualization of data sets. For example, FERRET is an excellent aid in the analysis of gridded model output. (FERRET Version 5 will be released this spring with internet enhancements.) An example of the use of FERRET is available at http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/papers/ESM_3-99/.
FERRET now forms the foundation of a web data server called the Live Access Server (LAS). LAS provides web access to meteorological and climatological data using FERRET as a data management and graphics "engine." LAS allows a remote user to interactively browse and explore data sets as well as to select, display, and retrieve custom data subsets in a variety of formats. To check out how the Live Access Server works with climate data point to http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/otter/NNDC/LAS/.
Both FERRET and LAS are available with full documentation at no cost from http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/Ferret/. Both programs run on most UNIX systems. FERRET runs in a Windows environment. Version 5 will be distributed with a web server (WebFerret) that will provide full access to FERRET within a web browser.
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