![]() ![]() As you can imagine, this process was exceedingly time consuming and these skilled workers were in high demand as the number of weather stations and timing of observations increased exponentially. Houze points out in his article, there were four key jobs which were necessary to make a weather forecast back in the early and mid twentieth century: observers who would transmit weather data, plotters who would receive coded weather observations and plot them on a map, analysts who would draw contours and note the locations of fronts and high and low pressure systems, and forecasters, who would use these manually generated maps to actually make a weather forecast. In order to be able to process the vast amount of data that existed even back in the 'old days' before automated weather stations and computer models, it was necessary to form a convention by which the meteorological information could be displayed visually on a map and easily interpreted with the human eye. Doppler Radar is the meteorologist’s window into observing severe storms. Even just plotting these variables on a map is quite an undertaking. One of the things that makes meteorology such a complex science is the huge number of variables which must be considered. These often include temperature, dew point (a measure of humidity), wind speed, wind direction, present weather, barometric pressure and pressure tendency (is it rising or falling?), cloud cover, and many others. Courtesy: NOAA/WPC.Īt any surface weather observing station, a multitude of parameters are recorded and reported every hour, if not more frequently. Surface analysis at 7:00 AM on Ma(the Blizzard of 1993). ![]() What Does a Meteorologist Do The duties of NWS meteorologists and hydrometeorological technicians (HMTs) vary by position and office. A meteorologist is a physical scientist who observes, studies, or forecasts the weather. Actually, looking at data on weather maps and figuring out what it means is STILL one of my favorite parts of my job today! What is a Meteorologist Meteorology is the science concerned with the Earth's atmosphere and its physical processes. In that class, we did a lot of hands-on work plotting weather maps, which was something I really enjoyed. For me, that light at the end of the tunnel was an introductory weather and forecasting class which I took during the spring semester of my sophomore year. Thus, it is very easy to get bogged down in all of the prerequisites and lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel- learning about the science of weather that drove you into those classes in the first place. As an applied science, meteorology has a lot of core class requirements, including calculus and differential equations, physics, and chemistry. I will never forget one of the first times I felt as an undergraduate that I had really arrived at the point where I was learning 'real meteorology'. Robert Houze of the University of Washington, and his daughter, Rebecca Houze. This post was inspired by a fantastic article which was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) in December 2019 by Dr.
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