- Industry: Weather
- Number of terms: 60695
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The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, ...
An absorber acting like a graybody. In practice, natural surfaces can be approximated as gray absorbers over only limited spectral ranges. The cloud-free atmosphere, however, is a selective absorber, and should not be approximated as a gray absorber.
Industry:Weather
An acronym, and formerly the aviation weather communications code word, for frontal passage.
Industry:Weather
Alteration of the anthropogenic emission rates of greenhouse gases in order to maintain atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at a particular level. The amount by which anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced to stabilize at present-day concentrations is substantial for most of the greenhouse gases.
Industry:Weather
Advance notice that a flood may occur in the near future at specified locations.
Industry:Weather
After U. S. National Weather Service practice, any meteorological station that is staffed in whole or in part by National Weather Service (Civil Service) personnel, regardless of the type or extent of work required of that station. Compare first-order climatological station; see also second-order station.
Industry:Weather
All rock material in transport by glacial ice, and all deposits predominantly of glacial origin made in the sea or in bodies of glacial meltwater, including rocks rafted by icebergs. “Glacial drift occurs as scattered rock fragments, as till (rocks mixed with finer material), and as outwash (fine material with no rocks). Contrast with angular drift. ”(from Glossary of Arctic and Subarctic Terms 1955).
Industry:Weather
Airspace of defined dimensions within which flight information and alerting services are provided.
Industry:Weather
A zonally symmetric circulation that appears to be thermally indirect (when viewed using height or pressure as the vertical coordinate) first proposed by William Ferrel in 1856 as the middle of three meridional cells in each hemisphere. A similar type of cell was described by Matthew Maury in 1855 and James Thomson in 1857 at about the same time. The Ferrell cell has sinking motion in the same latitudes as the Hadley cell, but has rising motion in higher latitudes (approximately near 60°). The Ferrel cell is maintained by heat and momentum fluxes due to large-scale eddies and by diabatic processes; these processes are illustrated by the Kuo–Eliassen equation.
Industry:Weather
A wind that accelerates as it moves downslope because of its low temperature and greater density. A fall wind is a larger-scale phenomenon than the individual-slope scale and is produced by accumulated cold air spilling down a slope or over a mountain range. The cold air often either accumulates on a plateau or other elevated terrain, or is part of an extensive cold air mass approaching a mountain range as a cold front. Fall winds may have a hydraulic character similar to water flowing over a dam, and one of the details of this flow is that the acceleration of the cold air begins to occur before the crest of the mountain range and therefore before the down-sloping portion of the topography. Fall winds are especially well developed as strong easterly winds on the coast of Norway, and for some distance inland; here they give a narrow strip of fine weather along the shore. They are also well developed on the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. At the southeastern tip of rocky Hagion Oros Peninsula in Greece, Mt. Athos rises to 2033 m (6670 ft) and descends steeply to the sea; northerly winds are disturbed by this great mass and descend as the cold northeasterly Athos fall wind, often of gale force, extending several kilometers out to sea. On the coast of Peru the name is given to sudden heavy gusts that often come down from the high land after onset of the sea breeze. At Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, descending squalls from the northwest are termed terre altos. In the Antarctic fall winds off the inland ice form violent blizzards. Other examples of fall winds are the mistral, papagayo, and vardar. Some authors have generalized this term to refer to downslope winds forced by large meso- and synoptic-scale processes (i.e., scales larger than that of an individual slope), even if they do not represent flows of colder air. Thus, under this nonstandard definition, the foehn and chinook could be considered fall winds.
Industry:Weather
