A Computer Derived Synoptic Climatology of Precipitation from Winter Storms

Abstract

As part of the investigation into the problem of forecasting heavy snowstorms in the eastern and central United States, a synoptic climatology of the precipitation associated with winter storms has been derived. In order to facilitate the derivation, a procedure was developed by which the necessary computations were carried out by means of an electronic computer. The computational procedure was designed so that given the position of the storm center (or some other storm feature) and observations of a weather element over a sufficiently dense network of reporting stations, the computer would derive and print out the areal distribution of the weather element over the grid network. The resulting synoptic climatology is presented.