Visualizing Drought

The impacts of drought depend on time-scale. On short time-scales, drought means dry soil. On long time-scales, it means dry rivers and empty reservoirs. A region may simultaneously experience dry conditions on one time-scale and wet conditions on another e.g. wet soil but low streamflow or visa versa.
Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is a widely used [...]

March 6, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  One Comment

Ensemble Prediction

Weather is unpredictable. Small differences in initial conditions can develop into big differences in the pattern of circulation, in the timing and location of cyclones, rainfall etc. This is true no matter how good the initial observing system is.
The approach taken by organisations such as ECMWF or NCEP is to re-run numerical forecast models with [...]

February 2, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  No Comments