Improved Color Palettes:
We assembled a collection of our finest weather geeks and came up with an extensive list of desired weather products. Once the scripts were written, we examined each product, image by image, fine tuning each color table so that the important features of each image would easily stand out. An example of this fine tuning is given below.

This is a surface temperature map. From first glance, it's very apparent where the warm and cool air is located and where the temperature contrast is greatest. This type of thinking was used in the fine tuning of color palettes for wind speed, absolute vorticity, dew point temperature and other related fields.

New Products:
As various graduate students were writing the scripts for generating images, they began to produce other products not seen (or very rarely seen) on the Internet (like isentropic maps).

This is an example of a 350K isentropic surface with plotted pressure contours, wind vectors and mixing ratio. Locations where wind vectors are flowing across the isobars towards lower pressures are also regions of upward motion, which is useful for determining where precipitation will likely develop.

overview

Terms for using data resources. CD-ROM available. Credits and Acknowledgments for WW2010. Department of Atmospheric Sciences (DAS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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