matty1's Blog

Matty, I really enjoy learning about different cultures and people in different countries. I also specifically enjoy seeing how weather is presented in different nations. I was fortunate enough to have met some meteorologists from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABOM). I was very interested in learning about their forecasting techniques. For us in the Northern Hemisphere the weather maps appear quite different than in the Southen Hemisphere since cyclones and anti-cyclones rotate in opposite directions than they do here.
I sat on a user's group committee at the University of Wisconsin's Space Science and Engineering Center for many years. I implented their Man-computer Interactive Data Access System (McIDAS) here at WTVT. The ABOM uses a derivative of the McIDAS system in forecasting. I understand McIDAS is still used . Here is the link to a paper concerning ABOM with references to McIDAS.
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/70519.pdf. The interesting thing about the committee was that no matter what country we lived in or what language we spoke there was a common understanding of meteorological principals and mathematical equations (which were not language dependant).