Model Animator Part 5: How to Select and Display Meteogram and Skew-T Charts

This is the fifth video in a series of tutorials demonstrating the use of the Forecast Model Animator page on the AccuWeather.com Professional web site. In this video, I will show how to use the animator to select and display meteogram and skew-t charts.

To start, I load a loop of the NAM model MSL pressure, precipitation and thickness for the “United States” map. The “United States” map is set up so that the latitude and longitude fields on the left side of the page change when the pointer is moved around on the map, and the “Select With Map” button is enabled. If you are viewing a map that is not set up for this, the “Select With Map” button will be grayed-out.

Next, I click on the “Select With Map” button, it changes to say “Click Map Now” and I click on the map to load a surface meteogram. This meteogram has graphs of 2-meter temperature, 10-meter wind speed, dew point, MSL pressure and precipitation over the run of the model. I then change the selection to a Relative Humidity/Wind Profile meteogram and repeat the process to get a meteogram for another point.

The profile meteograms sometimes take a long time to load because the system needs to process a lot of model data to produce them. Sometimes they take too long and the image comes up blank or broken. In order to fix this, try using the “Reload: Image” button right above the meteogram selection box.

A location can also be selected by changing the latitude and longitude in the boxes, or by entering a station code in either box. In the video, I enter the station code “NYC” to get the meteogram for New York City.

Next, I select a skew-t from the menu and select a point on the map. Unlike meteograms, skew-t charts show a single point in time, so what loads is a loop of skew-t charts valid at several forecast hours. Moving through the forecast hours shows how the temperature, wind and dew point in the vertical profile are changing with time. The skew-t charts also have a hodograph and some convective indices on the right side.

Meteograms and skew-t charts are currently available for the NAM and GFS models. Skew-t charts can also be made for the ECMWF deterministic model, but meteograms are not available yet. In the future we will have these products available for the RAP model as well.

TIP: You can find a list of U.S. surface stations and their codes here.

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