How To Read Weather Plots Of A Weather Map

Video Transcript

"Hello I'm weather announcer Melissa Schenk and on behalf of Expert Village today we're going to be talking about the weather. In this clip lets talk once more about how to read weather maps in the earlier segment we we're talking various simple very basic terms. And I want to show you a couple of different examples now when your reading surface analysis and when we get into weather plots it can get very very detailed. There's some great websites out there that you can get some wonderful maps wonderful weather maps one of my favorites and one of the best out there is Nora.govnoaa.gob and that stands for the national oceana atmosphere administration they have everything and anything on there to do with weather. But when we talk about how to read weather maps especially surface maps you will see that every station every weather station has a station weather plot and this is an example here now if a typical station weather plot it probably looks like a bunch of symbols and bunch of numbers, you can see how detailed that this can get. Well this actually these numbers and symbols do mean things to meteorologist so I keep a very simple for you and I'll just point out a few different things. Now on the upper left hand corner you'll see the number 77 well that is actually the temperature that is the temperature spotted in Fahrenheit. Along the center which I've just highlight for you the clouds those are the clouds types and they are indicated there is a cloud chart that you can actually see the different types of symbols that you can use for classifications. On the second row with the far left number number 5 that you see there is actually visibility so how far in miles can you see you might have fog to deal with so in this case the visibility is 5 miles in this particular weather station plot. And you can see we got all kings of other symbols on here another one just to point out is the wind direction you see the lines at the bottom there pointed towards the left and upwards those lines indicate actually the wind direction and the speed because there's 2 notches in there. So depending on the number of notches it either 5 knot or 10 knots or 50 knot so you can see that this can get very complicated very quickly so this is just a few points when learning how to read weather maps. "