David Williams
EF4
So, being a regular user of Met Ed, I often find myself getting into things that are over my head. Today while I was doing a lesson on identifying conveyor belts in satellite imagery, the text in the lesson refereed me to another lesson: Isentropic Analysis https://www.meted.ucar.edu/isen_ana/navmenu0.htm
After taking the lesson, I'm intrigued and obviously still a bit perplexed with Isentropic Analysis. If I've got it right, IA is a different way of dissecting the atmosphere compared to typical pressure charts. Instead, the atmosphere is analyzed using theta or temperature lines in a cross-sectional plane. In case I didn't word that properly, let me explain the long way around. Instead of using constant pressure as the medium for dissecting the atmosphere where we slice the atmosphere horizontally at a constant pressure from a top-down perspective to find out how high it is off the ground and add winds, temp, or whatever to the analysis, we use theta or quantities of temperature in Kelvin to slice the atmosphere vertically and look at where those temps are from the ground to the tropopause along a distance of many hundreds of miles. This allows us to see fronts etc. more clearly.
The lesson went through the advantages and disadvantages of using isentropic analysis in very general terms. Now, since this was my first experience learning or hearing about isentropic maps I didn't understand everything anyway. Also, it was pretty heavy handed with equations. Equations and I don't mix well. However, from what I generally got, it sounded interesting, and I wanted to know what other people in the ST community think about IA.
Is anyone familiar with Isentropic Analysis? What do you think of them as a forecasting tool?
Does anyone use Isentropic maps for forecasting storms?
I looked on CoD and I found one IA map in the Analysis Data section. How would someone forecasting tornadoes best use that analysis map?
Since I don't really know much about IA, is there any helpful hint or suggestion about IA maps that I should know or learn about?
Should I just forget about IA and get on with my life?
Thanks,
David
After taking the lesson, I'm intrigued and obviously still a bit perplexed with Isentropic Analysis. If I've got it right, IA is a different way of dissecting the atmosphere compared to typical pressure charts. Instead, the atmosphere is analyzed using theta or temperature lines in a cross-sectional plane. In case I didn't word that properly, let me explain the long way around. Instead of using constant pressure as the medium for dissecting the atmosphere where we slice the atmosphere horizontally at a constant pressure from a top-down perspective to find out how high it is off the ground and add winds, temp, or whatever to the analysis, we use theta or quantities of temperature in Kelvin to slice the atmosphere vertically and look at where those temps are from the ground to the tropopause along a distance of many hundreds of miles. This allows us to see fronts etc. more clearly.
The lesson went through the advantages and disadvantages of using isentropic analysis in very general terms. Now, since this was my first experience learning or hearing about isentropic maps I didn't understand everything anyway. Also, it was pretty heavy handed with equations. Equations and I don't mix well. However, from what I generally got, it sounded interesting, and I wanted to know what other people in the ST community think about IA.
Is anyone familiar with Isentropic Analysis? What do you think of them as a forecasting tool?
Does anyone use Isentropic maps for forecasting storms?
I looked on CoD and I found one IA map in the Analysis Data section. How would someone forecasting tornadoes best use that analysis map?
Since I don't really know much about IA, is there any helpful hint or suggestion about IA maps that I should know or learn about?
Should I just forget about IA and get on with my life?
Thanks,
David
