ATS 553 Tropical Meteorology

Penn State University offers a Tropical class and has a great "list of links" to support the class activities. You may find some good sites from their list but a word of caution -- it has not been updated since Oct 1997.	USA Today gives a summary of current activity affecting the United States, links out to stories, forecasts, latest news, etc.; and has good basic animated tutorials on hurricane basics of development, storm surge, and life cycle.
WeatherUnderGround's Tropical links concentrates on the ocean areas surrounding North America; data for other ocean basins is limited.	Millennium Weather Tropical Page This is a "hobbiest" page that has links to dozens of data sources - find what fits your needs
Check out the various satellite imagery available from Harvard University: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/sat/	This site has a very extensive list of data links - and links to other sites -- under the WWW Virtual Library
InterMet InterMet is an only available on the World Wide Web. It aims at publishing articles written by operational meteorologist and meteorology students. You will also find links to up to date satellite imagery, model output from world-wide met services, links to the home offices of met services, and published articles.	Numerical Models - International and Tropical: Kevin's Numerical Model Page contains over 200 educational and governmental links to numerical model output from various short and medium range weather computer models. http://atmos.umd.edu/~carroll/models.html This page contains links to short and medium range weather computer numerical model output specifically dealing with Tropical forecasting: http://www.meto.umd.edu/~carroll/intmodel.html
The University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) has a good Tropical Cyclone page with global satellite imagery and movies, links to active cyclone warnings, archived data back to 1995, and some "cool" images. Check it out.

Brief Descriptions of Several Models- Dated Information

Model Biases -- take a look and then decide how these known biases affect forecasting in the Tropics

Weather Numerical Models and Forecasts links up to oputput for many, many models -- and has some Tropical material as well

MRF Tropical Forecasts by the MRF model ( model details) issued by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (formerly the National Meteorological Center) are presented individually, or in two formats: either in a set of five panels for each 12 hour interval out to 72 hours (and then each 24 hours out to 120 hours), or as a series of panels showing the evolution in time of a particular set of fields

The Stratosphere -- Links to numerous resources dealing with Ozone, QBO and many other aspects of this portion of the atmosphere.

Assignment #1 - due 8 Feb	Assignment #2 - due 21 March
Assignment #3 - due 2 May