- Industry: Weather
- Number of terms: 60695
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, ...
The error in range, generally negligible, caused by propagation of radar waves through an inhomogeneous atmosphere in which the refractivity is sufficiently variable to make the propagation path depart significantly from a straight line.
Industry:Weather
The equilibrium state of an atmospheric column for which any net loss or gain of radiant energy is balanced by the vertical transport of latent or sensible heat. Radiative–convective gain provides an approximate description of the long-term global average of the vertical temperature structure of the atmosphere, and is useful in some types of climate models.
Industry:Weather
The equation of the regression function. It may be of any functional form and the terms may be orthogonal or not.
Industry:Weather
The episodic flux of high-energy protons and other energetic particles from the sun. The ionization created by these particles as they enter the upper atmosphere is responsible for polar cap absorption events and for chemical effects in the neutral upper atmosphere.
Industry:Weather
The energy released as heat or light when two oppositely charged portions of an atom or molecule rejoin to form a neutral atom or molecule.
Industry:Weather
The encoded and transmitted report of radar features observed by a WSR– 88D radar. The message consists of three main parts. Part A contains a display and tabular listing of composite reflectivity data; the display may also contain annotations or graphical overlays generated by various radar algorithms. Part B contains a vertical profile of horizontal wind obtained from the velocity–azimuth display (VAD) algorithm. Part C contains the locations and characteristics of features automatically generated by radar algorithms (e.g., tornadic vortex signature, mesocyclone signature, storm centroid, storm top, and hail indices) as well as optional manual entries (e.g., precipitation type, height of melting level, location and movement of individual storms and tropical storms, and location of line echo wave patterns).
Industry:Weather
The encoded and transmitted report of a special observation. This has been replaced by the SPECI observation in the METAR code.
Industry:Weather
The encoded and transmitted report of a marine weather observation by a ship at sea.
Industry:Weather
The electrical current in the atmosphere that is required to balance the observed air–earth current of fair-weather regions by transporting positive charge upward or negative charge downward. Accounting for the supply current has been for many years a key problem of the field of atmospheric electricity and has received much attention. A quasi-steady current of about 1800 A for the earth as a whole is estimated to be required to balance the air–earth current. Wilson (1920) suggested that the thunderstorms present in widely scattered regions of the earth at any one time might be responsible for the supply current. Although this suggestion has not been fully confirmed, there is growing conviction that this is correct. When one considers an average over many storms, thunderstorm lightning transports negative charge downward to earth, as does point discharge in the regions below thunderstorms. Also, positive ions flow upward above active thunderstorms. See air–earth conduction current, point discharge current.
Industry:Weather
The electrical current accompanying any specified source of point discharge. In the electrical budget of the earth–atmosphere system, point discharge currents are of considerable significance as a major component of the supply current. Estimates made by Schonland (1928) of the point discharge current from trees in arid southwest Africa suggest that this process accounts for about 20 times as much delivery of negative charge to the earth during typical thunderstorms as do lightning discharges. Although the great height of thundercloud bases in arid regions, such as that referred to in Schonland's study, tends to favor point discharge over lightning charge transfer, point discharge still seems more significant than lightning even in England, where Wormell (1953) found for Cambridge a ratio of about 5:1 in favor of point discharge over lightning charge transfer.
Industry:Weather
