SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY FALL 1997

DEPARTMENT OF GEOSCIENCES

Meteorology 815

Seminar on Severe Weather

Credit: 3 units Room: TH604

Prerequisites: Metr 502 and Metr 503 or consent of instructor Th 0810-1100

Instructor: John P. Monteverdi

Office: TH509; Office Phone: 1778

Purpose of the Course

The purpose of the course is to apply theoretical principles and map/chart/image analysis techniques learned in learned in Metr 502 and Metr 503 in an intensive study of analysis and forecasting of severe weather. This study will involve the so-called "dynamic" and "thermodynamic" controls, environment setting large scale factors, mesoscale "focusing" factors, dynamics and kinematics of rotation, thunderstorm morphology, and, to some extent, pattern recognition.

Logistics of the Course

Each student will be expected to participate in seminar fashion. Although there will be no quizzes, each week students will be assigned seminal literature to review and to present to the seminar in oral presentation with a short typewritten summary turned in to the instructor. These presentations will be graded.

At the end of the semester, each student will submit to the instructor a research paper, prepared in the format set by the Authors Guide of the American Meteorological Society. The paper will be a case study of a severe weather event or an examination of some important facet of such an event. Students may use the original literature surveyed in the seminar as starting-point in their literature survey.

In the preparation of the paper, students MUST use the SHARP workstation to assess thermodynamic and shear parameters and WXP or PC-GRIDs to assess the dynamic controls, as suggested by Doswell (1987) ("The distinction between large-scale and mesoscale contribution to severe convection: A case study example.")

In addition, each student will prepare a version of his or her paper in HTML and will make it accessible to the WWW via the Metr 815 Web Site (in preparation).

Text Book

Bluestein, Howard, 1993: Synoptic-Dynamic Meteorology of the Midlatitudes. Vols. 1 and 2.

Church, C., Burgess, D., Doswell, C., and R. Davies-Jones, 1990: Tornado: Its Structure, Dynamics, Prediction, and Hazards. Geophys. Mon. 79