- Industry: Weather
- Number of terms: 60695
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, ...
An algorithm for calculating the altitude that a plume will rise due to momentum and buoyancy forces before reaching an equilibrium height. Plume rise increases with higher buoyancy or momentum of the plume and decreases with increasing wind speed or vertical temperature gradient in the atmosphere. The rate of rise is fastest at the point of emission and decreases due to the entrainment of ambient air, which has minimal momentum and generally lower temperatures than the original plume. The plume is considered to be at its final height when the rate of rise decreases to at point where it is equivalent to vertical velocities generated by turbulence in the atmosphere.
Industry:Weather
An airmass thunderstorm that forms rapidly in an otherwise rain-free environment. This most often occurs on warm, humid days, in unstable meteorological conditions.
Industry:Weather
An airborne radar used for high-resolution ground mapping that employs a fixed antenna beam pointing out of the side of the aircraft. Narrow azimuth resolution is obtained with a long aperture mounted along the side of the aircraft or by use of synthetic aperture radar processing.
Industry:Weather
An aggregation of sufficiently many atoms or molecules that it can be assigned macroscopic properties such as volume, density, pressure, and temperature. But sometimes by particle, without qualification, is meant a subatomic particle such as the proton or neutron (which themselves are composed of other “elementary particles”) or the electron. See'' also'' particles.
Industry:Weather
An active microwave instrument designed to infer wind speed and direction by precisely measuring the backscattering cross section (or normalized radar cross section). The Seasat-A satellite scatterometer was an example.
Industry:Weather
An accumulation of spongy, whitish chunks of ice a few centimeters across formed from grease ice or slush. It forms instead of pancake ice if the freezing takes place in seawater that is considerably agitated.
Industry:Weather
Altitude in the standard atmosphere corresponding to a particular density.
Industry:Weather
Air mass having a stable stratification in its lower layer, and consequently free from convection, having a low degree of turbulence, and containing either stratiform clouds, fog, or no clouds at all.
Industry:Weather
Air that has originated over subpolar oceans and is returning poleward after an equatorward excursion around an anticyclone.
Industry:Weather
Along-slope flows generated by heating or cooling of the slope. A warm slope surface, as produced by daytime heating, generates anabatic or upslope winds, whereas a cool surface, as from nocturnal cooling, generates katabatic or downslope winds. Slope flows are a component of mountain–valley and mountain–plains wind systems.
Industry:Weather
