Forecast for tomorrow "10-16-11"

[Brian Davidson]

I'm trying to predict what will happen using bufkit. I'm forecasting for the Kansas City area.

This is going to be very basic as I am still learning how to narrow the forecast. Also, since tomorrow wont be an explosive day, it will be harder to predict when this will get going "right".

I'm guessing it will star raining at 7am.

The things that are confusing me is that tomorrow night bufkit at 9pm is telling me that there is a chance for sleet. Is this correct? Its -52 degrees at the top but how can I tell what the temps are going to be at the base?

any help would be great, thanks!

edit: How do I take a high res screen shot? Anyway, this is for tomorrow at 9pm.

 

[Jeff Duda]

Where do you see indications of sleet in that image? Since the lowest 5000 ft of that sounding is above freezing with a surface temp of over 10 C and temps above the freezing level are not uber cold, I don't see how that sounding supports frozen precip (unless I'm reading it wrong). The screenshot is pretty small and fuzzy, so it's hard to tell some things. I would use alt+print screen and paste it into MS Paint, then save as a PNG for best quality screen shots.

What model data are you using?

You can look at actual data either by switching to the "data" tab/button at top left or by turning on active readout in the "overlays" menu on the center left of the window.

Keep asking if you have more questions.

 

[Brian Davidson]

Is this any better?

http://photographybydavidson.com/img/v2/p516413432-5.jpg


Can you explain what I'm looking at? It all looks greek to me. I'm trying to learn now so in the spring I can go toe to toe with any prediction. Thanks!

 

[Jeff Duda]

It's a time-height section of relative humidity (showing the vertical profile of relative humidity as time goes from right to left. There's a color bar in the upper left which shows the colum becomes mostly saturated between about 02Z and 07Z (so 9 PM to 2 AM) tomorrow. It would be a good bet that the model spits out precipitation during that time as well. You can find out by displaying it (open up the "precip" menu at the top and click on the option to show precipitation).

 

[Brian Davidson]

I did what you said It added some bars

http://photographybydavidson.com/img/v26/p607148221-5.jpg

The local weather says it is supposed to rain but in the graph I don't see any new bars poping up for the morning. Also, when I right click on the bars it gives me a reading of .05". Does this mean how much it is supposed to rain?

Thanks!

 

[Jeff Duda]

What source are you using for "local weather"? Realize that the BUFKIT data you're looking at is pure model output with no human interpretation. So unless a forecaster is taking the BUFKIT output directly into a forecast, you shouldn't expect them to agree 100%. The green bars that showed up are precipitation falling during the respective time interval (it looks like one-hour increments, so that is displaying 1-hr precipitation each hour). When you right click on a bar or section of bars it the display pops up with the integrated amount of precipitation. So if you right-click on just one bar you will get a 1-hr precip amount. If you right-click and drag left you will see the numbers add up as the program integrates the hourly precip values into a time-period-total or storm-total amount of precipitation.