Visualization of real-time simulations of the atmosphere for education
Haraldur Ólafsson, Bolli Pálmason, Hrafn Guðmundsson, Trausti Jónsson · EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts · 2013
Visualizing the three-dimensional evolution of the atmosphere in real time can be motivating for students and a challenging for all people interested in weather and climate. Recently, the Icelandic Meteorological Office has started to provide a large collection of output from operational numerical models on the web in real-time. The products consist of plots of basic parameters such as pressure, temperature, winds and humidity as well as a series of functions of these such as vorticity, potential vorticity, thermal winds, turbulent fluxes and turbulence kinetic energy. The plots are suitable as a tool to deal with a wide range of tasks in dynamic meteorology, including elements such as barotropic and baroclinic flows, planetary to short-scale waves, orographic disturbances, quasigeostropic theory and atmospheric fronts. The plots illustrate processes ranging from mesoscale to hemispheric scale and are used increasingly for educational purposes. The plotting tools are VisualWeather, Magics++ and GrADS and the web address is brunnur.vedur.is/kort/spakort.