KRCG-TV Needs You - Introduction To Forecasting
A flu bug has gripped the television station. Everyone has become sick, including the entire weather staff. Because you have been through most of the Weather Scouts program, we know that you will not let us down.

Your first mission is to look at a surface map of the United States and make an analysis of the current weather conditions. The second part of the mission will be to provide a general forecast for middle Missouri.

Before the weather team became sick, we created this lesson to give you a better idea of how to forecast. You will be given two weather maps to help you create a forecast, the current surface weather map for 6:00PM on the night of November 9, 1998 and a forecast surface map for 2:00AM the morning of November 10, 1998. We have already discussed most of the weather features that will be on the maps, now you will need to put all of these pieces together to create a forecast.

Does this weather map look familiar to you? If you have ever watched a television weathercast it should. It all looks fairly cluttered, until you understand what all of the symbols. Throughout the previous lessons you have learned about many concepts and now it is time to put some of them together. We will look at a weather map of the entire United States and discuss several weather features and how they will behave in the region where they exist.

We will only refer to the behavior of weather in the Northern Hemisphere in the lesson, because your forecast will be for central Missouri.

Some weather features will behave differently in the Southern Hemisphere. You are not responsible for Southern Hemisphere weather in your forecasting however, if are interested follow this link for a few interesting differences, Southern Hemisphere verses Northern Hemisphere