Weather Discussion

In this interactive course, students will apply their (theoretical) knowledge about the atmosphere and numerical modeling to learn how to forecast weather going from the large-scale to the local-scale. During the first half of the term, synoptic weather charts from numerical weather prediction models will be used to forecast large-scale weather phenomena. This part applies knowledge from previous lectures in order to understand where and when weather systems develop and how they are linked to strong winds, extreme temperatures or precipitation. In the second half, studends will move to the local scale and perform a weather forecast for the weather of the following weekend in Zurich. Thereby they will learn to exctract crucial information from a complex set of models, to cope with model uncertainties, and to evaluate and improve their forecasts.

As a second component, the students will learn how to perform a case-study by analyzing a historical weather event based on reanalysis data and scientific publications, and to present the results in a compact and scientific way.

Complementing these parts will be a selection of internal and guest talks providing the students insight into different aspects of weather forecasting both in the public and private sectors.

The tasks and criteria required to obtain the credit points are:

• 1 short oral review of the weather forecast of the previous weekend
• Weekly participation in the external page weather tournament (during the second half of the term)
• 1 oral group presentation of your own case study
  
• Attendance is compulsory and active participation is required:
  • Starting from the second absence, justification has to be provided
    
  • With 3 or more absences, additional work has to be completed

Groups

Within the first week of the lecture you will be assigned to a group based on your case study preference. Once you've been assigned to your group, please decide on a groupname and enter it here.

Please upload your slides before your presentation here. 

Weather tournament

The external page weather tournament is developed for students, meteorologists and automatic forecast systems (MOS). The aim of the contest is to predict the weekend weather for Zurich as accurate as possible. Please refer to our Intro slides for information on the variables to predict. Players who don't participate still receive a certain amount of points, which is that weekend's mean minus the standard deviation. Please, additionally to the forecast submission on Friday to the weather tournament webpage, put in your forecast and the points you got into the google spread sheet at latest until Monday evening after the forecasted weekend. This gives an overview of our performance and helps the groups responsible for the weather tournament recap the following Friday to make a nice analysis.

IWAL

The Integrated Weather Analysis Laboratory (IWAL) allows you to create surface weather charts, plot cross sections and much more. It is very helpful for the analysis of your case studies. Some general information about IWAL can be found protected page here.

Case study

Detailed information will be provided in the lecture and by the responsible assistants. Please refer to the protected page guidelines for the presentation of your case study.

• protected page Storm Lothar, 1999
• protected page Storm Jeanette, 2002
• protected page Euopean floods, 2021
• protected page Blizzard Jonas, 2016
• protected page Cold episode, 2012
• protected page Summer flood, 2005
  
• protected page Medicane Zorbas, 2018
• protected page Australian Heatwave, 2009
• protected page Snow Storm Thorsten, 2005
• protected page Storm Burglind, 2018
• protected page Beast from the east, 2018
• protected page Storm Klaus, 2009