Adriatic Guide to Meteorology and Oceanography

Preamble

The adriatic sea is quite the center of several different climates and is influenced by their rather complex and contraversionary effects. In spite of this metereological behavour is not always as we expect it to be as local effects prevent usual predictions.

Very often we find the way natives predict the local weather really adorable as we are not able to build up the same instincts. The way we can achieve a bit of these insticts can be summarized:

• One of the "Secrets" is to get a good knowledge of the local climate
• Keep an eye on nature itself, observe the color and behavour of plants and animals, the smell and colour of the sea
• take good care of your common metereological knowledege.
• whenever possible ask the natives about their prognosis and the observations it is based on.
• try to build up your insticts
• never depart without a detailed weather report, preferably from split radio (navtex)

Climatology and Climate Navigation

Usually we rely on weather reports of several radio and internet services and we do not verify their range of accuracy. To do this we need a few basic terms:

Climate and Weather

The Global Climate encompasses the long period statistics of

• temperature,
• humidity,
• atmospheric pressure,
• wind,
• precipitation,
• atmospheric particle count and
• other meteorological elemental measurements

 in a given region.

The Local Climate is generated by the climate system, which has five components:

• atmosphere,         The air up to 75 NM or 120 Km
• hydrosphere,         the combined mass of water found on, under, and over the surface
• cryosphere,            collectively describes the surface where water is in solid form, including
                                   sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover...  
• land surface and
• biosphere               the global sum of all ecosystems
   

Weather is the present condition of these elements and their variations over shorter periods.