MSC/COMET Winter Weather Course Home Page

The Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), in conjunction with the Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET®), will hold its Third Winter Weather Forecasting Course December 1st to 13th 2002 at the COMET facility in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The Alaska Region of the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), a partner in the MSC/COMET Northern Latitude Training initiative, will also be participating. Funding for the MSC/COMET training initiative is provided through the Environment Canada Learning Fund.

Representatives from all five MSC Regions, Aviation and Defence Services and the Canadian Meteorological Centre will be participating. NWS will be sending six participants including three from Alaska. Course instructors include professors from leading US and Canadian Universities as well as experts from the MSC and the NWS.

Following input from the evaluations provided by participants in two previous Winter Weather Courses, the material to be presented has been further refined to be of greatest benefit to operational meteorologists.

The course will once again focus on hazardous winter season meteorology, from the synoptic scale to the mesoscale. The ultimate goal of the course is for participants to increase their understanding of winter weather phenomena and, following the course, to transfer this knowledge to local forecast centre meteorologists. To further enable this knowledge transfer, efforts will be made to make available as much of the material as possible for the participants to take back to their offices as Power-Point presentations or as Web-based modules.

Following the successful and popular inclusion of short regional presentations by the students in the previous winter weather course, this component will be continued. These talks provided a “reality” break following some of the more academic lectures and stimulated much discussion between students from the differing meteorological regimes across the continent.

To enable further improvements to be made to subsequent courses, the students will again be asked to provide evaluations of the course content on a daily basis. These evaluations will also help in the design of other learning materials and methods to help fulfill the MSC goal of developing a sound scientific basis for the forecasting process.

MSC/COMET Winter Weather Course
01 December - 13 December 2002 

COURSE SCHEDULE

• Travel Authorization Code is 20-02-0000-06-93-00-00 48M1JPD PWW
• Participant Registration
• Pre-course Reading
• Logistical Information -- IMPORTANT Information
• Students
• Instructors
• Regional Presentation Topics
• Post-course Questionnaire
• Directions to COMET
• GARP Tutorial
• Vis5D Tutorial

For information on the MSC/COMET Winter Weather Course or on any other COMET Course, contact Dr. Greg Byrd @ byrd@comet.ucar.edu or for help in other areas:

• Administration Support adminhelp@comet.ucar.edu

COMET Classroom Education and Teletraining Home Page