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submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Not quite, "sounding" means we capture vertical profile of atmosphere as a snapshot. This is usually done with weather balloons and bunch of sensors attached (temperature, moisture, etc). We have sounding stations in all state https://www.weather.gov/upperair/sounding. Data from these weather balloons are fed directly live into weather models as "truth" so the models can course correct and make better near future predictions. It depends on the station, but hourly soundings is generally common. The TV station weather lady was complaining that in her particular state (WI) there hasn't been any sounding data at the time when she's supposed to be on air despite being under literal tornado warning right now.

Ofc, people at NWS got their shit together and released appropriate sounding data close to the tornado landfall https://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/soundings/25042900_OBS/, but this illustrates that under reduced sounding frequency, hourly forecast became less accurate and there can be circumstances where people will get severe weather alert way later than they would/should.

this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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