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Old 14th Nov 2007, 12:35
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Saturday is a very good example. If you go back to basics and look at the Met office model charts for the day it becomes clear that the high pressure that has been dominate the last few days is being forced south by an active low pressure which will be centred to the north east of Iceland by mid day. The associated front will cross the country during the afternoon and Saturday night depending where you are. Not surprisingly, the wind will increase in advance of the front and I suspect will become very gusty in frontal activity. You can expect a sgnificant change in the wind during the day depending where you are in the country.
What I find is that the European weather forecasts are generally very good at predicting where the high and low pressure systems go, and what the fronts are going to do in between plus the associated weather. However, over a longer period, it is usually the timing that's off. So if a front passage is predicted, four days in advance, at noon someday, then the front will pass that day, but it may happen anywhere between midnight and midnight.

www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten gives you access to the more or less raw data from the European forecasts centers. I find it very handy, if I need to do my own long-term forecast, to compare the different outcomes of the different runs of the different models, to see what the general pattern but more importantly the timing is.
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