ATM350 Lecture 2 Agenda, 29 January 2013
Welcome! Background, "Silly Bus", Course Schedule
Assignment of your ATM350 "Home Site"
Log in to Windows platform on maproom PC's
Network Drives: K: "home" unix directory; S: "Share drive"; V: ATM 350 directory
Create Bufkit directory on V drive
Secure Shell Login to ash.atmos.albany.edu
NWP Forecast Models:
GFS
NAM
SREF (Short-Range Ensemble Forecast)
Forecast Model Soundings:
Analyze Forecast Soundings with BufKit!
BUFKIT Home Page at NWS Warning Decision Training Branch (WDTB)
Real-time BufKit soundings from Penn State
Upload files to our RAMADDA Server
Thursday Lab Exercise and Homework:
Preliminary Tasks:
Demonstrate QPF accumulation with BufKit
Demonstrate SREF plume diagrams of accumulated precip with BufKit
Demonstrate display of archived soundings with BufKit
Lab Activities:
Save the current day's 1200 UTC NAM BufKit profile for your METAR site to the common shared Bufkit data directory (S:\bufkit\data). Then copy it to your V:\Bufkit directory, and rename it so it includes a date and time string at the beginning of the file name, followed by a <period>. E.g. 13013112 .nam_kalb.buf . This will allow BufKit to display it as an archived forecast sounding file.
Then copy the above date-stamped file to the BUFKIT Archive folder: S:\bufkit\data\archive.
Then open a web browser and go to our RAMADDA server .
Log in to your RAMADDA directory. Create a Bufkit folder and upload your date/time-stamped Bufkit file to that directory. I will demonstrate this at the start of the lab time today.
You will then begin work on the lab + hw1 exercise. Pair up and work together on the Albany forecast. Then get started on your assigned city's forecast.
You will need to conduct a post-mortem evaluation of your forecast once you have verified it. Ross and Kevin will obtain 1200 UTC NAM soundings for Albany and the sixteen assigned METAR sites on Friday and Saturday and place them in the S:\bufkit\data\archive directory. Use these BufKit soundings as proxies for a real observed sounding.
Include a brief writeup with your worksheet that assesses how well today's BUFKIT sounding did as a forecast tool for predicting maximum wind speed and temperature for Friday and Saturday for your assigned METAR site. If the verification did not match the forecast using the BUFKIT mixing-height method, use the verification BUFKIT profile to explain possible sources of disparities.
Your worksheet and writeup are due by the start of class next Thursday, 7 February, as homework assignment # 1. Unlike future assignments, this assignment will be accepted in hardcopy format. However, you are required to have uploaded your Thursday, Friday, and Saturday BufKit profiles for your assigned METAR site to RAMADDA directories. (hint: browse to the S:\bufkit\data\archive directory when choosing your file to upload. You will need to upload one file at a time).