Featured Article
Forecasting weather's fury: implications of the Madden-Julian oscillation
Tomasz Tyranowski, Yuk L. Yung, and Duane E. Waliser
Several meteorological projects are striving to obtain data about the current state of the atmosphere and to integrate new discoveries with historical records. One such project is the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS), a satellite instrument for measuring ozone levels. An important atmospheric phenomenon which has been newly characterized with TOMS data is the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), an equatorial traveling pattern of anomalous rainfall. The MJO is now recognized as a significant contributor to the global climate and plays an important role in seasonal and interannual climate variations. This article examines tropical intraseasonal variability of ozone levels, a weather phenomenon which is found to be intimately connected to the MJO. Understanding the connection may allow for enhanced prediction of ozone levels and air quality over time, ultimately enhancing the accuracy of forecasting models.