Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level: Dvorak Technique

Mains level: Weather forecasting

Recently, the American meteorologist Vernon Dvorak passed away at the age of 100 who pioneered the widely used Dvorak Technique.

Dvorak was an American meteorologist best credited for developing the Dvorak (read as Do-rak) technique in the early 1970s.
The technique helps forecast the tropical storm.
His technique has saved the lives of millions of people across the world and will continue to do so.

The Dvorak technique was first developed in 1969 and tested for observing storms in the northwest Pacific Ocean.
Forecasters used the available satellite images obtained from polar orbiting satellites to examine the features of the developing tropical storms (hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons).
During day time, images in the visible spectrum were used while at night, the ocean would be observed using infrared images.
It was a cloud pattern recognition technique based on a concept model of the development and decay of the tropical cyclone.

Unlike land, ocean observations in the 1970s were sparse.
Today, there continues to be an improved network of land-based meteorological observations, either in the form of taking manual observations, installing automatic weather stations or automatic rain gauges.
On the other hand, ocean observations still remain limited.
There are many vast regions across the four oceans that have not been fully examined with meteorological instruments.
Ocean observations are mostly taken by deploying buoys or dedicated ships, but the number of observations from the seas is still not sufficient across the world.
That is why meteorologists have had to depend more on satellite-based imageries, and combine it with the available ocean-data at the time of forecasting the intensity and wind speed of the tropical cyclones.

Dvorak Technique of Weather Forecasting

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