Do you check the weather each day to help you make decisions? For instance, do you listen to the forecast so you’ll know what to wear or whether to carry an umbrella? Since the weather is always changing, we rely on meteorologists to predict the weather. Some people think meteorologists just guess, but there is a lot of science that goes into forecasting the weather.
For a meteorologist, the atmosphere is a large puzzle. If you’re good at solving puzzles, you might be a good weather forecaster. Every day, meteorologists try to solve the “weather puzzle” by putting many pieces of atmospheric information together. The difficulty is that the atmosphere has so many pieces of information that you can’t account for all of them. Some pieces of the atmospheric puzzle are always missing, so forecasting the weather can be a challenge. That is why weather predictions are never 100 percent accurate.
One of the first things that a meteorologist does before making a forecast is to investigate the current state of the atmosphere. Weather observations taken by equipment on the ground and by weather balloons higher in the atmosphere are mapped and analyzed to understand the current conditions. These maps help meteorologists locate areas of high and low pressure, cold and warm fronts and storms.
High- and low-pressure centers are important because pressure differences cause air to move. We feel moving air as wind. Also, high-pressure systems generally bring good weather while low-pressure systems often bring stormy weather. Cold and warm fronts separate areas of warm and cold air and are often where storms develop and intensify. Meteorologists also use satellite and radar images to find developing storms and precipitation.
After the ground level and upper atmospheric observations are made, reports from all over the world are collected and used in “computer models” to predict how storm systems will develop and move. The computer models are computer programs designed to simulate the real atmosphere. In making their predictions, computer models solve millions of mathematical equations, which are based on the scienceof the real atmosphere.
The computer models are not perfect, and it is the meteorologist’s job to evaluate the computer models’ predictions when making his or her weather forecast. Meteorologists often rely on predictions from several different computer models to make their forecast. Experienced meteorologists learn situations when the computer models are more (or less) accurate and account for these strengths or weaknesses when making a forecast. Meteorologists also account for local weather effects caused by mountains and large bodies of water.
Finally, when a meteorologist has looked at all of the available information, he or she attempts to solve the “weather puzzle” and makes a forecast. So the next time you hear a weather forecast, you’ll know that it’s the meteorologist’s attempt to solve a complicated atmospheric puzzle.
