- 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, ...
A relative measure of flood productivity. It is a numerical factor used to compare extreme floods on different streams, given by the extreme discharge (in cubic feet per second) on a stream divided by 100 times the square root of the drainage area (in square miles). Typical values in the eastern United States range from 30 to 40, but values as low as 1 or 2 occur in the Great Basin, and some as high as 300 occur on some basins in west Texas.
Industry:Weather
A radiometrically traceable color system based on the Commission International de l'Eclairage (CIE).
Industry:Weather
An approximate hydrological method of flood routing through a reach of river, based on the equation of continuity and a storage equation expressing the linear dependence of the water volume in the reach on the weighted inflow and outflow.
Industry:Weather
A horizontal boundary layer in which lateral transport of momentum exerts a torque on fluid parcels, thereby allowing them to cross isolines of background potential vorticity. In many ocean general circulation models, the western boundary currents are Munk boundary layers.
Industry:Weather
A series of Japanese geostationary satellites designed to provide meteorological observations and air traffic control functions. The meteorological component of these three-axis stabilized satellites is a 5-channel visible and infrared imager similar to that carried by GOES-10. Like the GMS satellites that preceded this series, MTSAT is positioned at 140�E longitude. The first satellite in this series (MTSAT-1R) was launched in February 2005 and became operational in June 2005.
Industry:Weather
One of the western boundary currents of the subtropical gyre in the southern Indian Ocean. It flows southward along the east coast of Mozambique through the Mozambique Channel and contributes about 30 Sv (30 × 10<sup>6</sup> m<sup>3</sup>s<sup>−1</sup>) to the Agulhas Current. Only about 6 Sv of this transport enter the Mozambique Channel from the north, fed from the northern branch of the South Equatorial Current; the remainder comes from the East Madagascar Current, which makes a northward loop south of Madagascar before it joins the Mozambique Current north of 15°S.
Industry:Weather
Name given to a region of activity on the sun when the details and nature of that activity cannot be established. This term was used in the 1940s to account for recurrent geomagnetic storms with a period the same as the period of solar rotation relative to the earth, that is, 27. 3 days. Today these storms are usually associated with high-speed solar wind streams emanating from coronal holes. See magnetic storm.
Industry:Weather
1. Ice-molded hummocks in relatively resistant bedrock. The characteristic streamline form of this glaciation is related to the direction of movement of the former glacier. 2. An ice field of polar ice in which there are streamlined hummocks.
Industry:Weather
The diurnal cycle of local winds in a mountain valley during clear or mostly clear periods of weak synoptic flow. The traditional components of the cycle are upslope (anabatic) winds, the daytime upvalley wind, downslope (katabatic) winds, and the nighttime downvalley wind (Defant,1951). In this traditional view, each component has corresponding compensatory currents aloft, presumably to form a closed circulation. For example, the downvalley wind would lie beneath a wind aloft directed up the valley. Observationally, these compensatory currents have been verified in some cases but not found in others. The classic model has the upvalley wind continuing until after sunset, but in many semiarid regions (or during dry periods), when the Bowen ratio is large and the surface heat flux is strong, boundary layer convection interrupts this model by mixing ridgetop winds down to the surface for much of the mid- to late afternoon. Where the valley opens onto a plain, a valley outflow jet, which represents a continuation of the downvalley wind, often extends many kilometers over the plain at night. Variations from this basic scheme arise from valley orientation, especially affecting the transition periods. In a north–south valley, for example, sunset occurs first on the east-facing slopes, and katabatic flows begin earlier there, which can result in cross-valley winds connecting with anabatic flow components on the west-facing sidewalls still in the sun. Similarly, at sunrise the east-facing slope is exposed to sunshine earlier than the rest of the valley, and therefore anabatic flows begin earlier there.
Industry:Weather
