- Industry: Weather
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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, ...
A vertical coordinate for atmospheric models that changes from one standard coordinate (for instance, the terrain-following sigma coordinate system) to another coordinate system as a function of height. For instance, hybrid coordinates allow a model to accrue the benefits of pressure or isentropic coordinates in the upper model layers where the use of a terrain-following coordinate is disadvantageous while avoiding technical difficulties associated with the use of a nonterrain following coordinate near the ground. See isentropic vertical coordinate, height vertical coordinate, vertical coordinate system.
Industry:Weather
A vascular plant that requires an abundance of water for growth; a plant growing in water or soils too waterlogged for most other plants to survive.
Industry:Weather
A usually dome-shaped mass of ice resting on rock and surrounded either by an ice shelf, or partly by an ice shelf and partly by the sea. No rock is exposed.
Industry:Weather
A type of very light ice fog composed only of ice crystals (no droxtals), and at times observable to altitudes as great as 7000 m. It is usually associated with precipitation of ice crystals. Observed from the ground, ice-crystal haze may be dense enough to hinder observation of celestial bodies, sometimes even the sun. Looking down from the air, however, the ground is usually visible and the horizon only blurred. For very sparse ice-crystal haze during daytime, sunlight reflecting from crystal faces produces sparkling in the air; hence the name diamond dust for these crystals. Compare arctic mist.
Industry:Weather
A type of synoptic chart showing the thickness of a defined layer in the atmosphere. This layer is the vertical distance between two constant-pressure surfaces.
Industry:Weather
A type of quasi-horizontal mixing in which layers of fluid (“intrusions”) flow laterally in alternating directions. Their signature is temperature (T) and/or salinity (S) inversions in a profile of T and S versus depth, indicating that layers of water have moved laterally from opposing directions. The term “interleaving layer” connotes an intrusive motion of large extent in the direction along the front.
Industry:Weather
A type of precipitation consisting of transparent or translucent pellets of ice, 5 mm or less in diameter. They may be spherical, irregular, or (rarely) conical in shape. Ice pellets usually bounce when hitting hard ground and make a sound upon impact. Now internationally recognized, ice pellets includes two basically different types of precipitation, known in the United States as 1) sleet and 2) small hail. Thus a two-part definition is given: 1) sleet or grains of ice, generally transparent, globular, solid grains of ice that have formed from the freezing of raindrops or the refreezing of largely melted snowflakes when falling through a below-freezing layer of air near the earth's surface; 2) small hail, generally translucent particles, consisting of snow pellets encased in a thin layer of ice. The ice layer may form either by the accretion of droplets upon the snow pellet or by the melting and refreezing of the surface of the snow pellet. Compare hail, graupel.
Industry:Weather
A tidal low water datum, designed for regions of mixed tides, that is depressed below mean sea level by the sum of the amplitudes of the principal semidiurnal lunar and solar tides and the principal diurnal tides (M2 + S2 + K1 + O1); originally developed for parts of the Indian Ocean.
Industry:Weather
A type of climatic diagram where the coordinates are some form of temperature versus a form of humidity or precipitation. A common, specific use is to show the annual “march” of mean monthly values of temperature and precipitation at a given station. Also, a comfort chart may be considered a hythergraph. There are many other possibilities.
Industry:Weather
