Visit the EUROMET Official Page and make a trip on the new teaching techniques
EUROMET Page
EuroMET makes available, for the meteorological community, a full set of training modules.
This modules are interactive, multimedia and network distributed and address in the initial
phase satellite meteorology and numerical weather prediction.
Each course is made of several parts. For the Satellite Meteorology course, a module on
blocking situations has been included in the topic Interpretation of Weather Satellite
Imagery.
Blocking is usually defined as a midlatitude anomalous flow pattern associated with a
strong meridional wind component, with a horizontal extension somewhere between
synoptic and planetary scales. It denotes a breakdown in the prevailing tropospheric
westerly flow at midlatitudes, that is often associated with a split in the zonal jet and
with persistent ridging at high latitudes. From a synoptic point of view, a blocking
situation is produced by a quasi-stationary high pressure core and is characterised by a
positive height anomaly relative to a regional mean in which the normal eastward
progression of migrating midlatitude weather systems is blocked. Some illustrating
images and animations for this phenomenon are included in order to introduce the student
in the problem of the midlatitude large-scale anomalies.