throughout the day and why some sounding indices are better than others in certain situations. Again we can follow the same process, look for the pressure height and draw a horizontal line across until you reach the temperature line drawn on the sounding, then match that up with the diagonal temperature lines. There is also a ton of CAPE and strong wind shear throughout the atmosphere. You can block or delete them by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website.We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps and external Video providers. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Click "learn more" to see it!We may request cookies to be set on your device. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features. The wind speed at 300mb is 37 knots and so forth. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page. SPC Experimental Sounding Analysis System Thanks for your interest in the web-based sounding analysis images created by the Storm Prediction Center (SPC).

We are making a small number of these available in the datacentre, but you can view forecast soundings for every town and postcode in the UK within Netweather Extra. An atmospheric sounding is a vertical profile of the atmosphere, meant to be representative of the atmospheric conditions at the point at which the balloon was launched. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features. We can read the wind speed exactly the same way as we would a temperature.

The information obtained here is made available to all national weather services via special communication networks. This is also why low pressure heights tend to correlate with more unsettled weather conditions.Pressure heights are very easy to read on the soundings – they’re the values on the left hand side.

This is where the “log-p” of this diagram comes from (The red numbers on the left side of the diagram are altitude values in kilometers (SFC means the surface, where the balloon was launched).The black numbers on the bottom of the diagram are temperature values in degrees Celsius. It also got a modal window now! You can even see that the scale goes much colder than -30C! It also got a modal window now! In the below example you can see the pressure start at 1000mb at the bottom, then rise to 900, 800, 700 etc as you ascend into the atmosphere.

Keen to see if you’ve learnt everything? In this example, the temperature and dew point are closer together which shows higher humidity.Let’s look at one final example – take a look at the temperature and dew point lines around the 500mb level – they both merge into one before splitting apart! about the 100 millibar level. This allows us to see temperatures, winds, dew point etc in the upper atmosphere at a single point. of instability in the low levels will depend on the amount of thermal advection and the amount of veering from We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website. When the wind direction changes in a clockwise manner, we say the wind is We will spend a lot more time with soundings in the future, so it is important to become familiar with what the basic lines mean.Next Monday I plan on discussing another type of upper-air chart, called a hodograph, which we use to quickly assess wind direction and speed with height. Click "learn more" to see it!We may request cookies to be set on your device. Soundings also display wind speeds at various levels throughout the atmosphere. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site.

We can go back to the sounding and see what level in the atmosphere these occurred at!We can see that the temperature falls to 0C at around 600mb, while the dew point falls to 0C above 700mb but below 800mb (probably around 740-750mb to be exact).What if we wanted to see temperatures throughout the atmosphere?