Weather forecasts are easily found on television, on the radio, online and on weather maps. What isn’t easily found are the definitions of vocabulary used in those weather predictions. Words like: jet streams, cold front, and high front are part of most every weather report, I’ve heard these words so often, I simply tuned them out because it is what you expect to hear from these reports and you assume you know what it means.
This artifact is taken from Discussion 4: Interpreting & Analyzing Fronts and Predicting Future Weather. I evaluated the front map in the discussion board and identified the pattern to be a stationary front. To further analyze the map I searched for a geographical map featuring mountain ranges and hypothesized that the shape of the front matched the mountain ranges. A similar approach was used to identify the source of the cold front that correlated with bodies of water. Publicly available resources were found using the google search engine. For our initial post, I used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA.gov) website. To analyze the maps, I consulted my notes produced from resources provided to us in class that are available online as well as power-point slides found in our modules. I forecasted simple data by using the knowledge I acquired of cold and stationary fronts. Understanding how to read a map featuring fronts helped in identifying the fronts I could see on the map, and therefore could predict precipitation for a few days in the stationary front, and cold weather at the cold fronts. I demonstrated my analysis to the surface and upper air weather by breaking apart the different fronts provided on the map. I began by looking at the stationary front first, looking at the geographical information, made my prediction of the type of weather that front provides, and then moved on to the cold front. Listening to weather reports after this particular week’s module has made me better understand what I’m looking at when I see a front map, and what to expect as far as what the weather will feel like and look like – such as what clouds to look out for and whether to carry an umbrella or not. |