r/meteorology

Hi, I was at IIM Kashipur, Uttarakhand, India. While looking at the southwestern sky at night, I noticed a white streak of light. At first, I thought it was a plane or something similar. After a few minutes, the streak became slightly longer, bent toward the left, and then suddenly disappeared. About five minutes later, it appeared again and behaved the same way.

My friend suggested it might be Venus, and I know it was in the general direction where Venus would be. However, can Venus even appear like that at night, or could it have been something else? Can someone help me identify what I saw?

I saw these smoke clouds at sunset from the Colorado wildfires coming off the mountains into the valley

https://xkcd.com/3267

I developed Weather World because I wanted a simpler, more helpful way to stay ahead of the forecast. I truly believe that a weather app should be a tool that makes your life easier, not a source of distraction with ads and confusing menus.

How it helps you: The core of the app is all about visual clarity. I’ve focused on creating intuitive graphs that let you see temperature shifts and precipitation trends at a single glance. Instead of reading through long lists of numbers, you can visualize exactly how your day will unfold. It’s minimalist, lightweight, and built for speed—perfect for anyone who values a clean Android experience.

I’d love your support! Please give it a try and see if it helps your daily routine. If you find it useful, please recommend it to your friends! As a solo developer, your support and word-of-mouth are what help me improve and grow.

In compliance with the community rules, I’ve shared the link via IndieAppCircle. Check it out there and let me know what you think!

Find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danie.pocasisveta

Not good for the folks in Perú. Yet another negative consequence of El Niño.

Pretty new to meteorology. Ive known about radar tearing for awhile, but never actually knew why. What im talking about is the scattered rain spots that look almost "stretched" out from the station. Whats the logical and technical explanation? Logical being dumbed down terms and technical being somwehat in depth explanation.​

Hello all -

I shot this video of lightning from a distant storm last night - when I looked at it this morning I noticed unusual small lights - you can see them at the right edge of the storm cloud. They look like small dots moving around the cloud.

Any ideas what this is? Is this a type of lightning?

EDIT: Just to clarify, I talking about the tiny dot of light at the right aspect of the cloud that seems to be moving around. You can start to see it at the 3 second mark - it helps to view it on full screen mode.

Hello,

Trained in biology, not meteorology. However, I have a lot of fun watching storms come and go on the Radarscope app.

Like many places in the U.S. it has been very hot for about the last week. A high pressure system has largely moved out of the way within the last few days and allowed for some storm development.

Just ahead of the storm, I've noticed a line showing up. Is this line a wall of dust being stirred up from wind?

Before the storm, there will be almost no wind, suddenly wind, and then almost no wind again before the storm hits.

Would love any resources for understanding more of what I might commonly see on the radar in the lower midwest.

I’ve noticed these rings recently and have been wondering what they are and what causes them?

A friend and I saw these really cool ripples in the cloud, we think they were from a storm cell far off to the right from where the photo was taken. Would these be gravity waves? Or some other type of wave?

Photo taken during the crazy weather in Northern Germany last week.

I guess this is considered discrete? It blew up, caused a few severe warnings in a very limited area, and died out as it moved east toward Rochester NY. Was the only storm around at that time.

Rather than a cell splitting into two, we have a great example of storms combining into one cell! You can really see the mesocyclone rotating in the dominant storm and persisting once it has merged! It was previously tornado-warned, but that has since been lifted.

(Pi 3b+)The thesis for this project is both simple, and a fun challenge: Design a model that only relies on locally gathered data, to predict severe weather events with minimal false negatives and an acceptable level of false positives, then put it all into a box that 'just works' when plugged in, unlike many 'smart' devices sold today.

I once bought a meat thermometer. I opened it to use on the Christmas roast, and the app greeted me with "we are happy to have been a part of your cooking experience. Unfortunately, as of <date 4 months prior>, our servers are shutting down."

Panicking about the tight timing of christmas dinner and cursing the God who made me, I ran out to get an emergency thermometer because <local big box store> sold me a brick! 

I got my money back eventually, but it's given me a vendetta against any machines or services that require offsite hardware, or require some company to pay their bills to work.

On June 10th, a major wind storm came to my city. That storm was powerful enough that it knocked all the NWS ASOS stations near me offline for a few days. Remembering my vendetta, and eyeballing the cheap Amazon-special weather station i recently acquired,  the seeds of an idea formed.

The result of that idea is Weather Station Alpha: A self-contained forecasting box that predicts seven distinct severe weather hazards across 1-hour and 24-hour horizons, using local sensor data only.

 The hardware sits inside a metal project box running neural net inference on a schedule, with an SDR, LEDs, a barometer, and its own cooling fans, so it runs at the absolute limit of what the Pi's power supply can handle. Any more overhead and this little guy undervolts. Ask me how I know.

I wrote five services to orchestrate the ui and api, sensor data pipeline, machine learning pipeline, active cooling, and physical LED status animations.

The prediction engine runs an LSTM neural net with attention, trained on 30 years of official NWS data. To resolve prediction confidence, the system blends a 500-pass Dropout Monte Carlo simulation 50/50 with a distance-weighted K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm. The Monte Carlo engine generates randomized path variants to simulate realistic transitions, while the KNN uses the network's N-1 layer as a vector embedding space. 

This acts as a real-time learner, and is the real strength of the system: when local anomalies or sensor quirks arise, you can flag the timestamps in the admin to inject new example vectors, teaching the box about local climatology and sensor quirks instantly without retraining the underlying neural network.

The data collection relies on an RTL-SDR USB dongle pulling radio transmissions from local wireless sensors, combined with an on-board USB barometer. 

After I got all the bits in the box, i drilled 1/2" holes. 2 in the lid for the antenna and LED, and one in the back for power. I put rubber grommets on those holes. I also added some o-rings to the silicone diffuser, and cut a nice decal and lettering for it with my circut machine. I think it came out pretty sharp :)

After initial setup, I spent a week calibrating it against the real local data..adding and removing samples and tweaking thresholds. It was a particularly stormy week so I had good data to test against. After that week, I was satisfied with its sensitivity and dataset...or so I thought.

About a week after this calibration a funny thing happened with the real time learning...The box was giving me a "wind" warning one afternoon. I looked outside at the nice calm day...and decided this was another false positive to be corrected and tamped down. I raised the thresholds and added a none point for that time.

Whelp, 15 minutes later, a gust front came thru that was strong enough to knock some tree branches off.

I sheepishly deleted that none point and put the thresholds right back where I had them. It was then I vowed to wait a week before questioning the black magic of the box and applying corrective inputs.

Now, if society collapses tomorrow, the National Weather Service disbands, and all the doppler radars are shut down...I'll still have a decent little severe weather warning system so long as I keep that computer powered, adjust it for events it misclassifies, and change the AAs in the sensors every 9 or so months. 

No one using this box will ever get a message saying "we are happy to have been a part of your weather experience, but our servers dont exist anymore, sorryyyyy".

The entire parts list, a more in-depth explanation, and the code are open-source and ready to build, available on my github.

Project repo: https://github.com/Dominic-Muscatella/weather-station-alpha

OR, skip over the setup instructions and go right to the explainer:
https://github.com/Dominic-Muscatella/weather-station-alpha/tree/master#how-it-all-works