Geography 103:  Weather

Exercise 3.  Reading a weather map

 

An excellent source for weather maps of the US is the web site weather.unisys.com.  At this site you can find surface data, upper level meteorological data, satellite images, radar data and forecasts for the US and Canada.  There are also extensive instructions for reading and interpreting these maps.  In this exercise you should go to the Unisys weather site and go to the link to Surface Data on the left side of the screen.  Click on the surface map to get an enlarged view of it.  You can then select alternative views from other regions within the US, Mexico and Canada.  You can also look at any of the hourly images over the past 12 hours.  At the top of the page there are options for other types of map - Vis (visible image from satellite), IR (infrared image from satellite), Enh IR (Enhanced infrared satellite image), WV (water vapor), Sfc (surface map), Rad (radar image), Norm (black background), Inv (inverse = white background).  Take the time to go through some of these options and look at the different images.

 

Choose the option More information on plots from the surface data page to get details of the symbols used in this plot.  Use these pages to answer the questions below.

 

You may print out this page, or select data sheet here to bring up the one-page data sheet in Word.

 

a.  Draw the symbol for a wind from the SW at 15 knots.

 

 

b.  Draw the symbol for light rain.

 

 

c.  Draw the symbol for light snow.

 

 

d.  Draw the symbol for 50% cloud cover.

 

 

e.  How would a surface pressure of 986.4 mb be written?

 

 

f.  What pressure is represented by 015?

 

 

g.  Draw the symbol for a cold front.

 

 

h.  Draw the symbol for a warm front.

 

 

i.  How is a center of low pressure represented?

 

 

j.  On the radar plot what do green areas show?