Learn meteorology

Troposphere to thermosphere, and why weather happens in the lowest layer.

What pressure is, how it is measured, and why it falls with height.

How the sun heats the ground, the ground heats the air, and the day warms and cools.

Why dew point, not relative humidity, is the number forecasters watch.

Condensation, cloud bases, and the ten cloud genera.

Why rising air cools, at the dry rate and then the moist rate.

Stable, unstable and conditionally unstable air, read from the temperature profile.

The energy for an updraft, the energy against one, and the three ways to lift a parcel.

Radiation, subsidence and frontal inversions, and the elevated mixed layer.

Pressure gradient, Coriolis and friction, and why wind crosses the isobars near the ground.

Where the jet stream comes from, how it moves, and what jet streaks do.

The waves in the upper-level flow and the weather under each part of them.

Spin in the atmosphere, from the jet stream down to the mesocyclone.

Divergence aloft, warm air advection and the quasi-geostrophic picture of ascent.

Where air masses form and how their source regions set their character.

Cold, warm, occluded and stationary fronts, and the weather along each.

The moisture boundary that starts many Plains supercells.

Station plots, isobars, fronts and what to look for first.

The 850, 700, 500 and 300 hPa charts and what each is for.

The wind profile as one curve: shear, turning, storm motion and helicity.

What STP, SCP, SRH and effective shear measure, and what their thresholds mean.

Reading model soundings, and where they are most often wrong.

Moisture, instability and lift, and the life cycle of an ordinary storm.

Single cells, multicells, lines and supercells, and the wind shear that decides between them.

The updraft, the downdrafts, the wall cloud and the parts a spotter names.

Updraft strength, the growth zone, and why the largest stones fall near the updraft.

Microbursts, bow echoes and the long-lived windstorms they can become.

Lines of storms, their mesovortices, and why their tornadoes are hard to warn.

How storms separate charge, the kinds of lightning, and the safety rules that follow.

Rainfall rate, training storms and terrain, and why floods kill more people than tornadoes.

Pulses, beams, tilts and volumes: what the WSR-88D measures and how.

What dBZ means, the color scale, and what heavy rain, hail and snow look like.

Inbound and outbound, couplets, and storm-relative velocity.

What each dual-pol product measures, and the debris, hail and melting signatures in them.

Hook echoes, inflow notches, BWERs, hail spikes and debris signatures, on real scans.

Beam height, gaps in coverage, velocity folding and the artifacts that fool people.

The three channels every forecaster reads, and what each can and cannot show.

Cumulus fields, overshooting tops, above-anvil plumes and outflow boundaries.

Observations, grids, physics and time steps: how a forecast is computed.

The GFS, ECMWF, NAM, HRRR and NBM, and what each is good at.

Why forecasters run a model many times, and how to read the spread.

Simulated reflectivity, updraft helicity and the limits of storm-scale forecasts.

The categories, the probabilities behind them, and the discussion text.

The Storm Prediction Center’s short-fuse reasoning, and how to read one.

The forecaster’s own reasoning behind your local forecast.

How tornadoes are rated from damage, and what the ratings can and cannot tell you.

From the morning outlook and soundings to a target town and a timeline.

Identifying what you are looking at: wall clouds, shelf clouds, RFD cuts and scud.

Where to be relative to the storm, and why the southeast is the usual answer.

SKYWARN, what to report, and how reports reach the warning forecaster.

Lightning, hail, flooding, road hazards and escape routes.

Warm water, low shear and the heat engine that drives a tropical cyclone.

The eye, the eyewall and rainbands, and storm surge, wind, rain and tornadoes.

How the temperature profile decides what reaches the ground.

Cold air over warm water, fetch, and why the bands are so narrow.

Why humidity makes heat dangerous, and how the heat index is computed.

Radiation, advection and upslope fog, and why fog forms on clear nights.