- Industry: Weather
- Number of terms: 60695
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
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, ...
Like cirrus; more generally, descriptive of clouds composed of small particles, mostly ice crystals, that are fairly widely dispersed, usually resulting in relative transparency and whiteness and often producing halo phenomena not observed with other cloud forms. Irisation may also be observed. Cirriform clouds are high clouds (see cloud classification) existing between −25° and −85°C. As a result, when near the horizon, their reflected light traverses a sufficient thickness of air to often cause them to take on a yellow or orange tint even during the midday period. On the other hand, cirriform clouds near the zenith always appear whiter than any other clouds in that part of the sky. With the sun on the horizon, this type of cloud is whitish, while other clouds may be tinted with yellow or orange; when the sun sinks a little below the horizon, cirriform clouds become yellow, then pink or red; and when the sun is well under the horizon, they are gray. All species and varieties of cirrus, cirrocumulus, and cirrostratus clouds are cirriform in nature. Compare cumuliform, stratiform.
Industry:Weather
Lightweight reflecting material, typically consisting of aluminum foil strips or metal-coated fibers, that is released in the atmosphere to produce radar echoes. Initially developed as a military countermeasure, chaff is used in meteorological research to enable tracking of air motions in conditions with no natural airborne scatterers or to provide stronger echoes than those from natural scatterers.
Industry:Weather
Large (roughly 300-km diameter) cyclonically rotating eddies found in the Sargasso Sea, containing cold Slope Water in their cores. They persist for several months, occasionally interacting with the Gulf Stream and getting destroyed in the process. A cold-core ring is formed from a large-amplitude Gulf Stream meander that pinches off to the south, trapping relatively cold Slope Water from north of the Gulf Stream within its circumferential current. See also warm-core rings, Gulf Stream rings.
Industry:Weather
Ions in which a charged molecule is surrounded by a number of loosely bound neutral molecules held by electrostatic forces. In the troposphere, the associated molecules are often ambient water molecules. In the stratosphere, positive ions are found to cluster with water or acetonitrile, while negative ions are mostly associated with sulfuric acid or nitric acid.
Industry:Weather
Introduce or increase the concentration of any physical, chemical, biological, or radiological substance in the water or soil.
Industry:Weather
Intentional or unintentional change of climate caused by human activity.
Industry:Weather
Intense tropical cyclones will often have two eyewalls nearly concentric about the center of the storm, the outer eyewall surrounding the inner one. A local wind maximum is generally present in each eyewall. Sometimes more than two eyewalls occur.
Industry:Weather
An air cleaner uses centrifugal force basis to remove particulate matter from polluted air stream.
Industry:Weather
Information about past climates used as a projection of future climate. Climate analogs generally take one of the following two forms:
examination of climatic patterns of periods with a particular climate characteristic (e.g., warm periods) in the instrumental or paleoclimatic record;
studies of groups of individual years or seasons, not necessarily consecutive, selected from the instrumental record for a particular characteristic.
Industry:Weather
