- Industry: Weather
- Number of terms: 60695
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The American Meteorological Society promotes the development and dissemination of information and education on the atmospheric and related oceanic and hydrologic sciences and the advancement of their professional applications. Founded in 1919, AMS has a membership of more than 14,000 professionals, ...
Ice formed in a smooth thin layer on a water surface by the coagulation of frazil through rapid freezing.
Industry:Weather
Ice that contains liquid water; a composite of ice and liquid water. Spongy ice is a form of accretion of supercooled drops in which the heat transfer is inadequate to freeze all the water. The excess water is included within the growing ice. Spongy ice may also form during the melting of low-density accretions by the meltwater soaking into the pores.
Industry:Weather
Identifying the geographic frame of reference and latitude and longitude coordinates that correspond to the scan coordinates of a satellite image.
Industry:Weather
Impaired vision or temporary blindness caused by sunlight reflected from snow surfaces. The medical name is niphablepsia. “Symptoms of snow blindness are a gritty sensation under the eyelids, excessive watering, double vision. First aid is to place the casualty in the dark or bandage the eyes; application of cool compresses alleviates pain. Most cases will recover in 18 hours without medical treatment”(from ''Glossary of Arctic and Subarctic Terms'' 1955).
Industry:Weather
In a broad sense, the process by which matter is excited to radiate by an external source of electromagnetic radiation, as distinguished from emission of radiation by matter, which occurs even in the absence of such a source. By this definition, reflection, refraction, and even diffraction of electromagnetic waves are subsumed under scattering. Sometimes scattering is applied in a restricted sense to that radiation not accounted for by the laws of specular reflection and refraction, which are approximate because matter is not continuous on all scales. Often the term scattered radiation is applied to that radiation observed in directions other than that of the source and may also be applied to acoustic and other waves. If there is no change in frequency between the incident and scattered radiation, the scattering is sometimes said to be elastic; the converse is inelastic. Scattering is also applied to any interaction between particles that results in a change in direction. See multiple scattering, Mie theory, Rayleigh's scattering law.
Industry:Weather
In a cloud seeding operation, seeding rate refers to the amount of seeding material released per unit time, per unit distance traveled, or per amount of air. The amount of seeding material can be characterized by mass, volume, or number of particles.
Industry:Weather
Generally, a forest that grows in a region of heavy annual precipitation, such as in a humid climate. Two types are distinguished: 1) the tropical rain forest (often simply called the “rain forest”); and 2) the temperate rain forest.
Industry:Weather
General term for the class of actinometers that measure the intensity of direct solar radiation. The instrument consists of a radiation sensing element enclosed in a casing that is closed except for a small aperture through which the direct solar rays enter. Pyrheliometers can be classified on the basis of the sensing elements employed. In one form the sensing element is a blackened water calorimeter. The rise in the temperature of the water gives a measure of the amount of radiant energy absorbed during the exposure of the instrument. Another type of sensing element consists of a blackened plate of high heat capacity. When radiation is allowed to fall on the plate for a period short compared to the thermal time constant, the temperature rise of the plate is proportional to the intensity of the incoming radiation. A third type of sensing element consists of a pair of plates, one blackened and one reflecting, that are continuously exposed to the incoming radiation. The temperature differential between the plates is proportional to the intensity of the incoming radiation. See Hand (1946) for descriptions of various types of pyrheliometers, for example, silver- disc pyrheliometer, water-flow pyrheliometer, Eppley pyrheliometer, spectropyrheliometer, Michaelson actinograph.
Industry:Weather
General term for any instrument that measures precipitation, usually meaning a rain gauge or snow gauge.
Industry:Weather
