Weather Break

Click here to listen to episode 259 of Weather Break

The jet stream tends to generally flow from west to east, but most of the time the path that it follows meanders north and south, in much the same way as a river might meander from side to side as it heads to the sea.  These “waves” in the jet stream are called “troughs” and “ridges”, and their number and arrangement have a lot to do with the surface weather features that we experience from day to day in the midlatitudes.  In today’s episode of Weather Break, Creighton University student Ross Caniglia and Dr. Jon Schrage talk about troughs and ridge and their significance to meteorologists.

Links:

The basics of troughs and ridges are explained on many web pages, including:

• http://cws.met.psu.edu/members/ridges2.html
• http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu/classes/met130/notes/chapter8/500mb_r_t.html
• http://www.theweatherprediction.com/charts/500/basics/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trough_(meteorology)

The current pattern of troughs and ridges in the Northern Hemisphere is provided to us by our friends at Unisys Weather.