Perhaps, the easiest part of this assignment was deciding which MD to translate.  I live in Pennsylvania, so winter storms have always been fascinating to me.  I feel I understand the atmospheric processes behind them a little more than a severe thunderstorm outbreak. For example, I was able to point out to Steve that evaporational cooling caused the wet-bulb freezing level to drop, rather than radiational cooling, like the MD states.  Even though I feel through my lifelong interest in weather and taking the first two courses in the Certificate Program has helped enhance my understanding of some of these processes more clearly, putting them into words for these e-portfolios always will be a challenge for me.

I can see there's more challenges ahead for me. For instance, I thought I knew quite a bit about winter storms and thunderstorms; however, after looking at SPC's Daily Archive Directory, there's so much there that I have yet to learn.  Our instructions say some of these fields may look like hieroglyphics to us, and that's exactly true.  One of my goals in METEO 361 is to understand many more of these images so I know how to interpret all kinds of MDs, not just winter weather ones and I don't even know everything in them yet.

Not only do I need to feel more comfortable with SPC's Daily Archive Directory, but also their Mesoscale Analysis Page.  There's so many fields on that website that I want to learn, too, as well as many other websites we've been introduced to.  Now that I see what all forecasters must look at before making a MD available for the public, it makes me want to learn about every technical reference even more and I can't wait until I do.


PAGE  1  2  3  4  5