Wind directions

Michael · Unread post by **Michael** » Thu 18/12/2003 16:06

The news just said on the radio on 1ZB 1080AM theres a fire at Piha fanned by a strong easterly wind.There must be a small anticyclone centred in New Lynn as we have a SW here getting stronger as the afternoon progresses

Michael · Unread post by **Michael** » Thu 18/12/2003 22:26

The wind is still blowing tonight from the SW and the sky has that yuckky lit up look to it cant see where the seabreezes in the forecast are with the low out east moving away and to the south allowing the high to move north

NZ Thunderstorm Soc · Fri 19/12/2003 18:18

That's nice.

Back to sea-breezes today here before the next useless front tomorrow.
I see MetService are predicting thunderstorms for Invercargill
I hope they don't get them

JohnGaul
NZTS

NZstorm · Unread post by **NZstorm** » Fri 19/12/2003 21:18

I think the odd thunderstorm for Fiordland and Westland given the fact
that air N'Wester onto the West Coast is looking quite moist. Invercargill will get a good period of rain with the front.

Isolated afternoon thunderstorms could be possible Sunday for Otago/Canterbury.

Skywatcher · Unread post by **Skywatcher** » Sat 20/12/2003 15:58

I finally got around to replacing the PC interface for my homebrew lightning detector last week. It's now online at http://www.templeton.gen.nz/weather/index.htm and updates every 15 minutes showing the last 12 hours of data.

Now all we need is a storm near ChCh (or even on the West Coast) to check how sensitive it is

The gusty NWer has eased this afternoon and there have even been a couple of brief showers - still not enough to measure in the rain gauge !

Cheers
Steven

Thunder · Unread post by **Thunder** » Sun 21/12/2003 10:09

Awsome Steven! Looking foward to a storm to see the results, are those some pulses on there allready?

Also, your sat pics have changed sligthly, is there some sort of radar combo with these sat pics or is it infrared or something showing cloud temperature with red etc being warmest and white being coldest? If so is white what the top of Cb's should be?

Camera update, I thought it would be here buy now, I just remembered that once I ordered a subwoofer from America and it took 3 days to get here! I'm not kidding. That was with FEDEX and I thought it would be ruffly the same because I chose them again but due to the feastive season I guess that's why it's taking longer.

Cheers
Aaron Wilkinson

Skywatcher · Unread post by **Skywatcher** » Sun 21/12/2003 12:27

The detector is probably too sensitive and it picks up some interference - usually just one per minute every few hours. I've found another circuit which is supposed to better and I hope to try that this "season".

The satellites send visible+IR during the day and two wavelengths of IR at night. I've switched the WXtoImg decoding software to generate images which add the NOAA IR "enhancement" for the coldest (highest) cloud tops. I think the highest are a kind of grey colour which you can see near Hawkes Bay on this morning's image.

There's a decoding mode that uses a custom palette which I've set up with the MetVUW rain radar colours for cold temps but it doesn't work very well at night.

I think you asked in another topic about the 250m resolution of the Terra/Aqua images - that's the "size" of a pixel and for comparison, the HRPT images at Landcare (which seems more reliable again) are 1.1km and the APT images I receive are 4km resolution.

Cheers
Steven