ORLANDO, Fla. – So much goes into the numbers you see on TV, but what is that process? Each meteorologist has their own forecast routine to get to those numbers and icons you see on a seven-day forecast.
A pinpoint accurate forecast takes time.
Knowing the current weather situation at the surface and upper levels of the atmosphere before putting the forecast together is critical.
A lot of meteorologists will start the process by looking at computer forecast models. Weather balloon launches twice a day feed weather data from near the surface to tens of thousands of feet up in the atmosphere to large supercomputers. Then, the model is created.
With this data, meteorologists know what the atmosphere is doing at different levels and how they may change over the next few hours, days or weeks.
It is important to check how the model initializes, or is handling current weather features. If the model isn’t performing well initially, it likely won’t into the future. Looking at satellite, radar and surface observations are vital in this part of the process.
Computer forecasts are a great tool to aid in the forecast process, but they aren’t gospel. The atmosphere is very large, but only tiny pieces of it can be sampled. That’s a lot of missing data that is not being fed into those models. That’s where human forecasters come in.
This is just one reason why hurricane hunters are so vital in tropical forecasting. There are no weather balloon launches out at sea, so we aren’t getting ground-truth data until the Air Force and NOAA drop their instruments.
Anyway, back to the forecast process.
After models and current weather are analyzed, it’s time for the meteorologist to put his or her own touch on the forecast. Using all of that data, they will determine what the rain chances will be, what time do the rain/storms begin, how much cloud cover will be seen and how hot/cold will it be.
With so much data to analyze, the forecast process can take a couple of hours, especially during the wet/storm season or when a strong cold front is threatening during the cold months.
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