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Waves on the world map latitude longitude and weather.

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See this world map latitude longitude lines, oceans, continents and poles? It's called the Eckert IV projection.

You can right (or control) click to get a larger version of it.

The latitude lines in this example are 15 degrees apart and the longitude lines are 30 degrees apart. The prime meridian is at the far left and right.

How do we use such a large scale map in weather forecasting? Key graphics such as waves appear in a seemingly chaotic fashion. What are these waves?

Entire books have been written about wave theory, both in meteorology, other branches of physics and even diverse topics such as stock trading. A complex pattern of waves appears on your typical upper-level atmospheric world map latitude longitude shown for clarity.

We first examine the broad waves – huge up and down patterns spanning a distance up to half way around the globe and reaching 30 or more degrees latitude up and down. Recall that latitudes span zero to 90 degrees north and south and, for longitudes, zero to 180 degrees east and west respectively.

Wave number identifies the number of main waves on each hemisphere – usually three or four, but can vary from 2 to 5. Large things like oceans and mountains create these Rossby or planetary waves and the waves blanket high temperature regions and shelter them from colder air masses. This is where we see our large-scale upper ridges and troughs...

...like the ones in this jet stream example.

These waves can be hard to identify sometimes and may require maps from two or three adjacent time frames to get a better idea of their locations. However, long waves do not move very fast through their world map latitude longitude ranges.

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What is a short wave?

No more than about half as long as a long wave.

Short waves move more quickly, though. They travel eastward down the long wave and show up as a bump on the larger trend. This is where we label most of our upper troughs and ridges.

We also find that they are tied to maximum and minimum values in vorticity, with our troughs associated with higher vorticity and ridges with minimum vorticity. In this way, a short wave trough commonly indicates an axis of maximum vorticity.

So what? This explanation ties in with weather in this fashion: air rises and clouds form ahead of a trough, while it descends and clouds dissipate in front of a ridge.

In fact vertical motion is responsible for this cloud co-relation. Also, these relations assist analysts in finding world map latitude longitude - troughs and ridges - by comparing to a satellite photo, especially where there is little other data to use, such as over the oceans.

Go back from World Map Latitude Longitude to the Chasing Storms web page.

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