UK meteorology

Wayne Pritchard said:
Great info again Chris and I am starting to learn the lingo a little but can you advise me what "GFS" is please? It seams to be mentioned constantly on the forum and I am becoming lost in translation.
EDIT: and "UKMO?"
Click to expand...
GFS is the main weather model of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which, along with the National Weather Service and NASA, forms the US equivalent of the Met Office and Environment Agency (many of us here in the UK don;t realise that atmos[heric science is a substantial part of the workload of NASA). The European equivalent is the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts (ECMWF), hence reference to the ECM model, and the Met Office version is the UKMO (literally UK Met Office). Each of these model providers has a wide range of model types, from short-range high-resolution precipitation forecasts, through the mid-range models Malcolm usually mentions (UKMO, GFS and ECMWF), which are collectively known as NWP, or Numerical Weather Prediction, types, through to long-range probabilistic models which show the most probable outcome for parameters like rainfall, temperature, windspeed etc. in terms of whether they're expected to be below-average, around average or above average over the next few weeks. By contrast, the mid-range outputs are described as "deterministic" or "NWP" show the most likely situation (whether atmospheric heights, temperatures at various levels, rainfall, wind direction etc).

To put it another way, the GFS, ECM or UKMO might produce an output showing temperature at the 850 hectoPascal (hPa, same as milibar) height of 20 degrees C for later next week, which is in fact what some are indicating at the moment, whereas a long-range probabilistic forecast might show the 850 hPa temperatures in a months' time as most likely to be between 10 and 20% below average for the time of year (I haven't checked what they're actually showing, BTW).
 
I posted quite a few 'learning' posts a couple of years or so ago, which you can find through the first half of this thread. I keep meaning to ask the Mods to help me separate those posts into a new thread, but the workload would be quite heavy, I suspect.
 
Regarding models, there are many I've never heard of, and most of them show details I don;t understand, so bear in mind what I'm explaining is simplistic stuff. Most of the NWP models have different output types, all of them deterministic, each of which covers all the different parameters.
 
Thank you Chris for such a fascinating and indeed informative reply. Your help and input is truly appreciated.

Now back to a little more studying.
 
If you go back and report the posts you want to separate then we can do it quite simply.
 
Concise post on the likely evolution for the next few days from a senior Netweather member:

 
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