Origen y desarrollos actuales de la predicción meteorológica

La Meteorología es una ciencia relativamente moderna si la comparamos con otras disciplinas científicas. Sus principales bases teóricas no quedaron establecidas hasta las primeras décadas del siglo XX, gracias a la labor de un grupo de brillantes meteorólogos suecos y noruegos, con Vilhem Bjerknes a la cabeza. Sin embargo, no fue hasta la década de 1950 cuando la Meteorología dio su gran salto cualitativo, gracias a la llegada de los ordenadores, lo que permitió el desarrollo y la puesta en marcha de las predicciones meteorológicas. Desde entonces, paralelamente al aumento exponencial de la capacidad de cálculo computacional, su desarrollo ha sido imparable, alcanzando en la actualidad un alto nivel de confianz

Orbital measurements of the Earth's radiation budget during the first decade of the space program

The instrumentation and data analysis methods applied to data from the Explorer 7, TIROS 2, 3, 4, and 7, and Nimbus 2 and 3 experimental satellites are summarized. Problems encountered in analyzing these data included: determining the value of the solar constant, inaccuracies introduced by degradation of the sensors in orbit, the need to infer the total reflected and emitted radiation from filtered measurements, the development of corrections for anisotropy in order to determine the outgoing flux densities at the moment of measurement, and the development of corrections to account for diurnal variability. The corrections for long- and shortwave anisotropy and historical determinations of the solar constant and albedo are treated in detail. These early measurements indicated that the planetary albedo was lower, the emitted radiation higher, and the equator-to-pole gradient of net radiation greater than previously supposed

Boundaries of research : civilian leadership, military funding, and the international network surrounding the development of numerical weather prediction in the United States

American meteorology was synonymous with subjective weather forecasting in the early twentieth century. Controlled by the Weather Bureau and with no academic programs of its own, the few hundred extant meteorologists had no standing in the scientific community. Until the American Meteorological Society was founded in 1919, meteorologists had no professional society. The post-World War I rise of aeronautics spurred demands for increased meteorological education and training. The Navy arranged the first graduate program in meteorology in 1928 at MIT. It was followed by four additional programs in the interwar years. When the U.S. military found itself short of meteorological support for World War II, a massive training program created thousands of new mathematics- and physics-savvy meteorologists. Those remaining in the field after the war had three goals: to create a mathematics-based theory for meteorology, to create a method for objectively forecasting the weather, and to professionalize the field. Contemporaneously, mathematician John von Neumann was preparing to create a new electronic digital computer which could solve, via numerical analysis, the equations that defined the atmosphere. Weather Bureau Chief Francis W. Reichelderfer encouraged von Neumann, with Office of Naval Research funding, to attack the weather forecasting problem. Assisting with the proposal was eminent Swedish-born meteorologist Carl-Gustav Rossby. Although Rossby returned to Stockholm to establish his own research school, he was the de facto head of the Meteorology Project providing personnel, ideas, and a publication venue. On-site leader Jule Charney provided the equations and theoretical underpinnings. Scandinavian meteorologists supplied by Rossby provided atmospheric reality. Six years after the Project began, meteorologists were ready to move their models from a research to an operational venue. Attempts by Air Force meteorologist Philip D. Thompson to co-opt numerical weather prediction (NWP) prompted the academics, Navy, and Weather Bureau members involved to join forces and guarantee that operational NWP would remain a joint activity not under the control of any weather service. This is the story of the professionalization of a scientific community, of significant differences in national styles in meteorology, and of the fascination (especially by non-meteorologists) in exploiting NWP for the control of weather

A study of the dynamics of droughts in Northern Brazil: Observations, theory, and numerical experiments with a global atmospheric circulation model

The monthly mean sea surface temperature anomalies over tropical Altantic and rainfall anomalies over two selected stations for 25 years (1948-1972) were examined. It is found that the most severe drought events are associated with the simultaneous occurrence of warm sea surface temperature anomalies over north and cold sea surface temperature anomalies over south tropical Atlantic. Simultaneous occurrences of warm sea surface temperature anomaly at 15 deg N, 45 deg W and cold sea surface temperature anomaly at 15 deg S, 5 deg W were always associated with negative anomalies of rainfall, and vice versa. A simple primitive equation model is used to calculate the frictionally controlled and thermally driven circulation due to a prescribed heating function in a resting atmosphere

100 Years of Earth System Model Development

This is the final version. Available from American Meteorological Society via the DOI in this recordToday’s global Earth System Models began as simple regional models of tropospheric weather systems. Over the past century, the physical realism of the models has steadily increased, while the scope of the models has broadened to include the global troposphere and stratosphere, the ocean, the vegetated land surface, and terrestrial ice sheets. This chapter gives an approximately chronological account of the many and profound conceptual and technological advances that made today’s models possible. For brevity, we omit any discussion of the roles of chemistry and biogeochemistry, and terrestrial ice sheets

¿Qué tiempo va a hacer?

¿Qué tiempo va a hacer? Desde la más remota antigüedad, el hombre ha intentado predecir el tiempo atmosférico, para tratar de librarse de sus efectos perniciosos o aprovecharse de sus beneficios. Actualmente, para predecir el tiempo se utilizan ordenadores superpotentes a los que hay que proporcionar un gran número de medidas, muchas leyes de la mecánica y de la física y, también, muchas matemáticas, a veces muy recientes. En este artículo se hace una introducción histórica de la meteorología, y se presentan los principios fundamentales de la predicción numérica del tiempo que realizan los distintos servicios meteorológicos. Se termina el artículo analizando la cuestión de hasta qué plazo es posible predecir el tiempo y con las predicciones climáticas

Computerexperimente

Seit der Einführung des Computers als Forschungs-, Experimentier- und Prognoseinstrument erleben die Wissenschaften einen tief greifenden Wandel. Nicht nur die Praktiken und Infrastrukturen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens verändern sich, sondern auch die Logik der Forschung unterliegt einer grundlegenden Transformation. Neben Theorie, Experiment und Messung eröffnen Computerexperimente ein neues Feld der Wissensproduktion und verändern radikal die Experimentalkultur der Naturwissenschaften. Am Beispiel der Klimaforschung rekonstruiert das Buch diesen Wandel der Wissenschaften »from science to computational sciences«