Meteorology Commons^™

Functional And Performance Requirements Of The Next Noaa-Kansas City Computer System (Appendix G), Frederick R. Mosher

Publications

The NOAA computer system in Kansas City, Missouri, was scheduled for a computer upgrade and this is part of the report listing the critical functional and performance requirements for that system in 1984. The system needed to communicate with all the other offices at that center in Kansas City.

Impacts Of Interactive Processing Systems On The Forecasting Ability Of The National Severe Storms Forecast Center (Appendix E), Frederick R. Mosher

Publications

The National Severe Storms Forecast Center (NSSFC) in Kansas City has the most modern interactive processing equipment of any operational forecast office in the United States. As such, the experiences of the NSSFC serve as the indication of some of the benefits which will be derived from interactive technology when it is applied in other forecast situations. The forecast products issued by the NSSFC have become more accurate and more timely. The forecaster's efficiency and productivity has noticeably improved. These improvements have been made without the introduction of any new data sources, any major advances in meteorology, or any major …

Lessons Learned From The Csis [Centralized Storm Information System] (Appendix D), Frederick R. Mosher, Joseph T. Schaefer

Publications

Various attempts have been made to give up-to-the-minute meteorological observations to forecasters. However, the meteorologist's inability to assimilate all the real-time data is a significant barrier to the improvement of short-term forecasts and warnings. Historically, failure to resolve this problem has plagued mesoscale forecast experiments. This article discusses the joint effort of NWS, NESS, NASA, and SSEC to develop a system to aid the forecaster in evaluating data.

Characteristics Of Water Vapor Tracked Winds, Frederick R. Mosher

Publications

Wind measurements were obtained by tracking water vapor features on Meteosat and GOES-VAS 6.7 micron water vapor images. While pure water vapor features are fuzzy, there are discernible features which can be tracked. An investigation of preprocessing algorithms designed to bring out the features to be tracked showed that high pass filters tended to bring out the noise in the image, while low pass filters washed out the features. Sliced linear gray scale stretching under operator control gave the best enhancement to the water vapor features.

Meteorological Significance Of Cloud Tracked Winds During Dst-5 And Dst-6, H. M. Goodman, Frederick Mosher, Tod Stewart, Verner Suomi

Publications

A study has been conducted to determine the meteorological significance of satellite derived cloud drift winds using data from the Data Systems Test (DST). Three synoptic weather events were chosen during DST-6 (January 5-March 5) for weather analysis and comparison. The three events each contained a prominent weather feature over the north Pacific Ocean. Two satellite sources (NESS and the University of Wisconsin), radiosonde and commercial aircraft reports combined to produce a wind set covering the target area.

A Model For Calculating Desert Aerosol Turbidity Over The Oceans From Geostationary Satellite Data, Carl C. Norton, Frederick R. Mosher, Barry Hinton, David W. Martin, David Santek, William Kuhlow

Publications

A technique has been developed to infer the optical thickness of Saharan dust from Synchronous Meteorological Satellite (SMS) brightness measurements at visible wavelengths. The scattering model consists of an air layer, a dust layer and a lower boundary of variable albedo. Single-scatter properties of the dust computed from Mie theory were the basis for calculations by plane-parallel theory of radiative transfer in the dust layer. Radiative interactions between air and dust layers and the lower boundary were calculated with an adding version of the doubling scheme. Optical thickness was determined from satellite brightness measurements through a lookup table produced by …

Shallow Convection On Day 261 Of Gate: Mesoscale Arcs, C. Warner, J. Simpson, D. W. Martin, D. Suchman, F. R. Mosher, R. F. Reinking

Publications

On 18 September 1974, a cloud cluster growing in the GATE [Global Atmospheric Research Program] ship array was examined using aircraft flying close to one another at different heights, the geostationary satellite SMS-1, and radar, rawinsonde and ship data, with a view to elucidating mechanisms of convection. In this paper we concentrate analysis on cloudy convection in the moist layer.

In and above southerly surface monsoon flow approaching the cluster, clouds indigenous to the moist layer took the form of rows of tiny cumulus, and of arcs of cumulus mediocris, with patterns different from those of deeper clouds. From satellite …

An Investigation Of Surface Albedo Variations During The Recent Sahel Drought, Carl C. Norton, Frederick R. Mosher, Barry Hinton

Publications

Applications Technology Satellite (ATS) 3 green sensor data are used to measure surface reflectance variations in the Sahara/Sahel during the recent drought period 1967–74. The magnitude of the seasonal reflectance change is shown to be as much as 80% for years of normal precipitation and less than 50% for drought years. Year-to-year comparisons during both wet and dry seasons reveal the existence of a surface reflectance cycle coincident with the drought intensity. The relationship between the green reflectance and solar albedo is examined and estimated to be about 0.6 times the reflectance change observed by the green channel.