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29 January 2016
The Future of Weather Forecasting
With new NOAA computers for numerical weather prediction now online, the focus is to improve the models we have and develop new ones. The new High Resolution Rapid Refresh Model (HRRR-H triple R to meteorologists) is just the beginning of this, and although it only runs out for 15 hours, we get a new run every hour. This is already improving short-term weather forecasts markedly. This model is run on …
30 October 2013
Sandy A Year Later- A Lot of Lessons Learned and Knowledge Gained
My friend Bob Henson at the National Center for Atmospheric Research has a great piece on Atmos News about Sandy today. NCAR has published some amazing high-resolution model runs of Sandy, and in some ways Sandy actually behaved like a tornadic super-cell. The model runs show that as Sandy approached a cold front, it tilted tubes of rotation air from the horizontal to the vertical. This same thing happens in …
29 January 2013
Salt Lake City Smog Approaches Beijing Levels
Despite those ski resort images of a deep blue sky and wonderful white powder, the air just down the mountain from such ski resorts as Snowbird and Alta has been a rather toxic soup recently. Salt Lake City has endured yet another winter episode of smog that makes the view look more like Beijing than what you would normally picture for Utah. A group of physicians in the city spoke …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.