The Station Model

The Station Model

You should be able to interpret most of the information from a station model, and our interactive station model tool will help you learn how to do that. I'm going to decode the parts of the station model that we've talked about so far, and explore wind direction and speed a bit more since they tend to be a bit more challenging.

For starters, at this station, the current temperature is 32 degrees Fahrneheit (temperature is the number in the upper-left of the station model). The dew point is in the lower left, so the dew point here is 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

The visibility is over on the far left here, and it's 2 miles in this case, because of light snow, as indicated by the 2 little snowflake icons. The sky is completely overcast, as indicated by the fact that this circle is completely filled in.

Of course, this tool is completely interactive, so we can change the weather conditions. We can change the temperature, the dew point, the visibility, and the present weather. So, now our temperature is 85 degrees Fahrenheit, our dew point is 70 degrees Fahrenheit, and our visibility is a half mile in a thunderstorm, and we can see the changes on the station model.

I want to spend a little time specifically on wind direction and speed so that you get used to the conventions for those variables. First, the tool defaults to a wind from 180 degrees. It's important to remember in meteorology that wind is expressed as the direction that the wind is blowing from.

If we assume that north is at the top of the image, south is at the bottom, west is on the left, and east is on the right, we can see that this 180-degree wind is blowing from the south to the north. We would call this a south wind, or a southerly wind.

We can change the wind direction to, say, 50 degrees. Now we have winds from the northeast to the southwest, and that's what it would look like on the station model. We would call this a northeast wind, or a northeasterly wind.

We can also tell wind speed from the station model. The speed here is 25 knots, as indicated by the two long wind barbs and the one short wind barb. Each long wind barb represents 10 knots, and the short wind barb represents 5 knots. So we sum those together, and we get a total of 25 knots.

If we had calm winds, we would just have an extra circle around the sky coverage because the wind doesn't have a direction. Or, on the other hand, we could make it really windy, and have 65-knot sustained winds –say maybe a hurricane is making landfall nearby. The pennant, or triangular barb, represents 50 knots, the long barb represents 10 knots, and the short barb represents 5 knots. Add those together, 50 + 10 + 5, to get our total of 65 knots.

I really encourage you to explore this tool. Trying out different conditions and seeing how the station model looks will help you get a feel for how to decode the station model.