Meteorology 3000- Mountain Weather and Climate
Assignment 3. Due September 14. 5 points
The purpose of this assignment is to gain familiarity with how to access surface weather information using MesoWest.
It is in your best interest to poke around and become familiar with the information available, rather than assume that the few ways shown here to look at information is adequate.
Getting Started
- On the department web page in the lower right hand corner, use the MesoWest Weather pull down menu (or the same pull down menu in the upper left on the MesoWest page). Select the "Location,ST" option and type university,ut
- You'll see a bunch of place names, including University of Utah. Select that one
- You will now see a list of stations close to the U/U including the department's station, WBB.
- Play around with the various options of using a zipcode, other geographic locations, station names, etc. back on the MesoWest Weather pull down menu
- Also navigate around using MesoWest and ROMAN from the top menus or a variety of starting places
- You should be able to get to this page from a bunch of different approaches, but the simplest is to enter WBB in the Station ID option
- If you get lost, just go back to the main page or to the MesoWest home page given at the top of this assignment.
Metadata
- Metadata is "data about data". Observations by themselves have little meaning if you don't know at a minimum where they are taken. Using the page, toggle through some of the options in the left margin to see what they do (they change units, time, provide different formats, etc.).
- Spend some time on the metadata available on the Station Information page for WBB and a few other stations that you might be interested in.
- Be sure to check out the topo map and satellite views of where stations are located.
MesoWest and ROMAN
- ROMAN is a subset of MesoWest designed for operational use by fire weather and forecasting professionals.
- Developmental ROMAN is where we test things a bit before operational implementation. There are some neat bells and whistles on developmental ROMAN.
- The help page on MesoWest contains a bunch of stuff that you may be interested in, but the help on the ROMAN pages is a bit more clear.
- I encourage you to poke around and see the various ways to access information: maps, tables, summaries, weather near fires, etc.
Questions
- I can't emphasize enough that it is in your own best interest to become familiar with using MesoWest tools for this course and other applications
- The following is simply to verify that you spent a minimal amount of time on this assignment.
- You are assigned to provide weather support for a fire near Willow Creek,CA in Humboldt County
- 1) What is the closest station to that location? ID and name? Who owns it? Where the heck are you?
- 2) What's the terrain like near the station? Are you near a coast, river, in a valley? What kind of vegetation, heavily forested or desert scrub?
- 3) Tell me what the weather conditions are now (in PDT) in English units (temperature, dew point, RH, wind speed, gusts)?
- 4) Why would we bother to report and display battery voltage?
- 5) Tell me what the weather conditions are now (in GMT) in metric units for the same variables
- 6) What was the temperature a year ago at the same date and time (hint use the past data option)?
- 7) How much has the temperature changed since the same time yesterday?
- 8) By how much has the temperature (degrees C) changed from morning to afternoon during the past 7 days? Is this diurnal change in temperature pretty regular from day to day?
- 9) What is the peak solar radiation received during the past several days (in watts/m^2)?
- 10) How do the winds change from morning to afternoon typically?
- 11) Bonus: all software has little undocumented tricks. Play around with MesoWest and see if you can change one of the default settings on one of the tools to do something different. If you come up with one, give me the link in your email so I can verify that you've found one.