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How to do your own weather forecasts (part 1).

Introduction.

This is the first article in a series of educational articles about the weather and how you can do your own weather forecasts. Several articles will be written containing the most important things to do and to look out for. It is not as complicated doing your own forecast as many may think. Just by looking at the sky, noticing what is happening with the clouds and the wind can make you a very good local weather forecaster. In addition a few cheap weather instruments, like an outside thermometer and a barometer, will make you even better to understand what is going to happen the next few hours or even a day before the weather event actually hits.

One of the most talked about subject is the weather, but few knows what is going on, except what they have heard or read and seen on the weather forecasts on radio, TV and newspapers. Almost every day something happens to the weather that makes big headlines. This is most often related to extreme weather events, like hurricanes, tropical cyclones, tornadoes, heavy rain, strong blizzards or records breaking droughts, heat or cold. Quite often these days, is the global warming and climate changes which are getting the blame for this. The climate debate has been adopted by politicians and is already making countries to disagree as they have, in their efforts to agree on the Kyoto treaty. But there has always been extreme weather events happening around the world. The question now is whether this is getting worse or not and if these climatic changes are man made causes or not.

In this first of a series of several articles, I will not debate the politics and merely will I try as far as possible to explain what is happening when different weather events occurs. It is possible to predict what will happen with the weather if you are informed and knows what to look for. The weather is not so difficult to understand as many may think. In fact everybody can be his or her own meteorologist and predict what will happen the next few hours or the next day, by just looking at the sky and make some educated assumptions (forecasts). Some additional weather instruments like a simple outdoor thermometer and a barometer will make it even easier to do such predictions, but also without them will just looking at the sky, doing some thinking and by developing the understanding, we can predict the weather with very good accuracy because the clouds and the wind itself tells you quite much, if you just know what to look for and to interpret what you observe. The best way of learning predicting the weather is to predict it.

This article series will try to explain in a popular format most of the weather phenomenas like rain, snow, ice, storms, depressions, highs and many more. I will also try to bring together forecasting techniques and procedures which everybody can understand and follow to make their own weather predictions. There are many reasons why it is wise for being able to “read” the sky and make your own weather forecasts. You may find that the weather forecasts on TV, radio or in newspapers are too broad and too diffuse to be of real use in your area. This is a product of the busy and and commercialized media and because of the weather forecasters have only fixed and limited time for their time on-air. This has the undesired effect that despite the forecasters high qualifications, they are unable to give sufficient details in that limited time the media allows them to use. Although some media forecasting is better than others, one can often see that news channels like CNN are so busy playing commercials that the weather forecasts for the whole US and parts of the world is done in about the same time as one commercial alone.

This rounds up my first article in a series of many, regarding learning about the weather and doing your own individual weather forecasts.

From the wxdude at www.metar.no