NASA GLOBE Observer’s Weekly Roundup: 26 November- 2 December 2017

How's the weather where you live? This and more in this week's edition of the roundup.

1. IMAGE OF THE WEEK: Satellites monitor our weather from space.

"The NOAA satellite GOES-16 captured this geocolor image of Hurricane Irma passing the eastern end of Cuba at about 8:00 a.m. EDT on Sept. 8, 2017."

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2. WEATHER: What is weather anyway?

"There are really a lot of components to weather. Weather includes sunshine, rain, cloud cover, winds, hail, snow, sleet, freezing rain, flooding, blizzards, ice storms, thunderstorms, steady rains from a cold front or warm front, excessive heat, heat waves and more.

Weather is basically the way the atmosphere is behaving, mainly with respect to its effects upon life and human activities. The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere. Most people think of weather in terms of temperature, humidity, precipitation, cloudiness, brightness, visibility, wind, and atmospheric pressure, as in high and low pressure.

In most places, weather can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day, and season-to-season. Climate, however, is the average of weather over time and space. An easy way to remember the difference is that climate is what you expect, like a very hot summer, and weather is what you get, like a hot day with pop-up thunderstorms."

3. SATELLITE: The JPSS-1 satellite (which launched Saturday, November 18, 2017)" improve the accuracy of U.S. weather forecasts out to seven days."

"JPSS-1 will join the joint NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite in the same orbit and provide meteorologists with observations of atmospheric temperature and moisture, clouds, sea-surface temperature, ocean color, sea ice cover, volcanic ash, and fire detection. The data will improve weather forecasting, such as predicting a hurricane’s track, and will help agencies involved with post-storm recovery by visualizing storm damage and the geographic extent of power outages."

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4. FORECASTERS: "The NOAA US Weather Research Program (USWRP) has been enabling research on atmospheric phenomena and improvements to weather forecasting since the early 1990's with improved forecast and analysis techniques transitioned into operations and hundreds of peer-reviewed publications attributed to the program. Managed in NOAA's Office of Weather and Air Quality in OAR, it supports research needs of the National Weather Service (NWS) and US Navy with research to operations projects via testbeds and external grants to academia on relevant issues."

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5. WEEKLY VIDEO: And of course, we do want to share with you our favorite cloud observation submissions from the past week. Thank you for sharing with us your observations from all around the world. 

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