Climate-Weather Sessions: General Instructions

Fall 2007

Students leading discussions of current climate and weather should start with the broad scale and then gradually zoom in on the local. Specifically, follow these steps:

1. Step 1: Review the monthly or seasonal climatological patterns for surface pressure and 500 hPa height to establish the average circulation for your region. As available, review the temperature, humidity and precipitation climatology.

2. Step 2: Review the recent (approx. past 2 days) weather across your home country (i.e., the large-scale weather). Primary attention should be given to evolution of circulation fields like 500 hPa heights and sea-level pressure, followed by other fields they affect, like precipitation, temperature, windiness, cloud cover, etc. How do they adhere to or depart from climatology? This should set the stage for Step 3.

3. Step 3: Focus on the current weather in your home state/province. Note agin whether this is typical or anomalous weather compared to climatology.

4. Step 4: Using forecasts of the circulation fields, discuss how the forecasted change will affect affect temperature, rainfall, cloud cover, winds, etc. over the next 2 days or so.

5. Step 5: Give some example(s) of how the recent, current or forecasted weather affects your community at large. For example, unseasonably cold weather might delay planting of crops, unusual wet weather might be producing flooding in some communities, windy weather might affect ocean conditions (perhaps for diving or surfing!). In other words, why are this season's climate and weather so important?

Some further notes:

• The whiteboard capabilities of the Breeze Meeting environment can be very useful for highlighting specific features.

• Various web-based resouces are available, among them:
  1. Climatology:
     • Annual Cycle maps from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center (CPC). Note that the averaging periods are not the same for all fields. The maps include global as well as US-specific coverage. The Pentad Mean (5-day average) animations are especially nifty.
  2. US:
     • The Iowa Environmental Mesonet page. Focus on Iowa and surrounding region.
     • The ISU Meteorological Weather Products page.
     • Index of Products from the CPC. Primary emphasis is on the U.S., but see below under Africa.
  3. Africa:
     • NCEP reanalysis I climatology for 1979-1997, from a UCT regional modeling workshop. Surface pressure and 500 hPa climatologies especially useful, though only available for January and July.
     • myWeather, run by the Climate Systems Analysis Group at UCT
     • Surface climatology for Africa, compiled by the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. Note their disclaimer at the top of the page!
     • More generally, the African Products home page from the CPC. Has a variety of analyses and forecasts.

     Other useful sites for Southern Hemisphere weather:

  4. Australia: Bureau of Meteorology, Commonwealth of Australia.
  5. Argentina: Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera, Universidad de Buenos Aires.

• Remember that you will be presenting to students who are in another country or who might not be originally from the region of their university (e.g., some graduste students). Thus, repeating information about climatology that was given in a previous session is not only acceptable, it is highly recommended.

• Questions from participants are expected! This is an opportunity to learn about the climate and weather of somewhere else from a native - any question somehow weather-related is relevant (note Step 5).

Go to main web page for Physics of Climate.