With the severe weather season upon us, I thought I would revisit and update an old post I wrote before joining Weather5280. Shortwave troughs are features in the general flow of the atmosphere that are very important when it comes to forecasting, particularly for convective features and winter weather. Shortwaves can be thought of as "weather-makers," whereas Longwaves (Rossby Waves) might then be "trend-makers." Multiple shortwave troughs can be imbedded within a Rossby Wave trough. Shortwave

This past week, we have been hit another meteorology buzz term of “Lake-effect Snow” (known in the meteorological community as LES). Buffalo, NY was inundated by heavy snow amount with some places receiving > 80” in a 5-day period. It snowed so much that the NFL had to postpone and relocate the Buffalo Bills football game this past Sunday to Monday night in Detroit. Even the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, got into the LES talk by blaming the National Weather Service (NWS) about their terrib

Numerical Weather Prediction or NWP, a popular abbreviation in the weather community, is a mathematical way to solve for the set of governing equations that predicts how the atmosphere will change over time provided with specified initial conditions such as temperature, moisture, wind speed, etc. In the early part of the 20th century, Vilhem Bjerknes and Lewis Fry Richardson, notable pioneers of meteorology, suggested that it would be possible to predict the weather by solving for a system of no