Weather Assignment

EENS 1300

Laboratory Assignment: Weather Prediction

Before you begin (and as you go), you might want to take a look at this on-line guide for some primers on cold/warm fronts, atmospheric pressure and weather forecasting that are a little more informative than what you’ll find in your textbook:

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gl%29/guides/mtr/home.rxml

In the lab, you will pick a location within the continental U.S. and predict the weather conditions that will impact that area for a span of three days. Your prediction may be wrong and you may not fully understand the reasons, but that’s OK. You just need to make an educated guess.

Day 1 – Pick a location. You can choose any location, but it will probably be easier/more interesting if you pick a place in the interior of the country or closer to the East Coast.

Using Weather Underground (wunderground.com), type that location into the main search field (where it says “Enter Location”).

After you pick the location, scroll down to “Current Data,” record the atmospheric pressure (inches of Hg), temperature, humidity, wind speed/direction, cloud cover and precipitation type (if any).

Go up to the top of the page and click on “Maps and Radar” and then “Maps.” This should take you to a “Current Conditions” map that shows major high and low pressure systems and fronts in the continental U.S. Make note of other weather systems in the country and predict what changes your location can expect in the coming days. Pay particular attention to where the high and low-pressure systems are and how quickly they are moving. This will give you the best idea of what will happen to the weather at your location in the coming days (note that there is an “animate” button right above the map, and to the right of the map, under “Select Location and Map Type,” you can view maps of other variables, such as temperature, wind, cloud cover etc).

Day 2-4. Repeat what you did on Day 1, making sure that you do so at approximately the same time of day. How has the weather changed? Is it changing as you predicted?

After Day 4, assess your prediction. How close were you? If your predictions were incorrect, do you know why?

Turn-in:

After you have finished your assessment, you will turn in: copies (or screenshots) of at least one weather map for each of the four days, a brief description of your initial predictions, a table (available on the next page) of atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, cloud cover and precipitation type for each day, and an evaluation of how accurate your predictions were and explanation of potential reasons you may have miscalculated.

Your grade on this assignment will not be based on how accurately you can predict the weather but on your attempt to do so. Do not change your predictions at the end of the four days, but let me know what your original instincts told you. As you know, even the

Day	Pressure (inches Hg)	Temperature (Fahrenheit)	Relative Humidity (%)	Wind speed (mph)	Wind direction (degrees from North	Cloud cover	Precip (type, amount)
1
2
3
4

professionals are wrong much of the time, and we the farther forward in time we try to forecast, the less accurate we are (in fact, meteorologists can only make predictions with very high confidence for approximately 48 hours in advance).