An Improvement in Forecasting Low and Convective Clouds for Broadcast

Low clouds and ground fog are two meteorological variables that forecast models find generally difficult to forecast. Many of these models are heavily reliant on relative humidity in some form such as Sundqvist’s equation for the ETA model (Sundqvist et al 1989). However, for my Bachelor’s thesis, I formulated a modification of Slingo’s equation for cloud coverage (Slingo 1987) in order to improve the forecasting of airport delays at San Francisco International Airport and to implement it as part of weather broadcasts. The goal of this is presentation is to examine an updated version of my equation, to see how it performs in predicting the stratus in San Francisco, ground fog, and other cloud-related scenarios applicable to broadcast meteorology.