Air
Beloit, Wisconsin. 3 AM, Mon Oct 19
Wind
Gust
Beaufort scale
Air quality
| Force | Wind (mph) | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | under 1 | Calm |
| 1 | 1–3 | Light air |
| 2 now | 4–7 | Light breeze |
| 3 | 8–12 | Gentle breeze |
| 4 | 13–18 | Moderate breeze |
| 5 | 19–24 | Fresh breeze |
| 6 | 25–31 | Strong breeze |
| 7 | 32–38 | Near gale |
| 8 | 39–46 | Gale |
| 9 | 47–54 | Strong gale |
| 10 | 55–63 | Storm |
| 11 | 64–72 | Violent storm |
| 12 | 73 and up | Hurricane force |
| AQI | Category | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0–50 now | Good | Air quality is satisfactory, and air pollution poses little or no risk. |
| 51–100 | Moderate | Air quality is acceptable. There may be a risk for some people, particularly those who are unusually sensitive to air pollution. |
| 101–150 | Unhealthy for sensitive groups | Members of sensitive groups may experience health effects. The general public is less likely to be affected. |
| 151–200 | Unhealthy | Some members of the general public may experience health effects; members of sensitive groups may experience more serious effects. |
| 201–300 | Very unhealthy | Health alert: the risk of health effects is increased for everyone. |
| 301 and up | Hazardous | Health warning of emergency conditions: everyone is more likely to be affected. |
Severe weather ingredients
Rotating storms need three things at once: unstable air, something to set it off, and wind that changes with height to tip a rising column into a spin. These are the numbers that describe the first and third. Any one of them alone means little — and every figure here is worked out from the sections below, so if one looks surprising, the evidence for it is further down the page.
| Ingredient | Value | Reading | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| CAPE | 0 J/kg | little instability | How much energy is available to lift air. The fuel. |
| Lifted index | 22.0 | stable | Negative means a rising parcel stays warmer than its surroundings. |
| Convective inhibition | 0 J/kg | little to no cap | The lid. A strong cap stops storms forming at all — until it breaks. |
| 0–1 km shear | 20 kt | marginal | Low-level wind change. The layer most associated with tornadoes. |
| 0–6 km shear | 25 kt | marginal, multicell | Deep-layer wind change. Separates organised supercells from short-lived cells. |
| LCL height | 999 ft | low base | Estimated cloud base. Lower bases are associated with tornadoes. |
This is not a warning service. These are rough versions of parameters the Storm Prediction Center computes properly, derived from one model's estimate at one grid point. They describe conditions; they do not forecast storms. For watches, warnings and anything you would act on, use weather.gov and the Storm Prediction Center.
Precipitation and cloud
Precipitation split by how it falls, and cloud split by how high it sits. Both distinctions matter more than the totals: rain and showers feel completely different, and it is the low deck that makes a day grey.
| Measurement | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Rain | 0.00 inch | Steady fall from layered cloud, spread over hours and over a wide area. |
| Showers | 0.00 inch | Convective: shorter, heavier, hit and miss. One street soaked, the next dry. |
| Snowfall | 0.00 inch | Depth of new snow falling this hour, not its water equivalent. |
| Snow depth | 0.00 ft | What is actually lying on the ground right now. |
| Cloud low | 1% | Below roughly 6,500 ft. The deck that blocks the sun and makes a day feel grey. |
| Cloud mid | 0% | Roughly 6,500 to 20,000 ft. Thickening here often means a front approaching. |
| Cloud high | 0% | Above 20,000 ft — thin ice cloud. Usually the first sign a system is on the way. |
| Pressure | 30.33 inHg | At sea level, which is what forecasts quote. Surface reading is 29.49 inHg, lower because Beloit sits above sea level. |
Solar
How much sunlight is reaching the ground, and how much the atmosphere is taking out on the way down. Watts per square metre mean little on their own — the clearness figure is the one that says whether it is actually sunny.
| Measurement | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Clearness | — sun is down | Share of the sunlight arriving at the top of the atmosphere that made it to the ground. Independent of season, so a clear winter morning scores as high as a clear summer noon. |
| Sunshine this hour | 0 min | Minutes of direct sun out of the last 60. |
| Shortwave radiation | 0 W/m² | Total solar energy landing on a flat surface — what a fixed rooftop panel sees. |
| Direct radiation | 0 W/m² | The part arriving straight from the sun's disc, casting sharp shadows. |
| Diffuse radiation | 0 W/m² | The part scattered by sky and cloud. On an overcast day this is nearly all of it. |
| Direct normal irradiance | 0 W/m² | Beam intensity measured face-on to the sun — what a tracking panel sees. |
| Terrestrial radiation | 0 W/m² | What would arrive with no atmosphere at all. The ceiling every figure above is measured against. |
| UV clear sky | 0.0 | What UV would be with no cloud. Actual right now is 0.0; the gap between them is what the cloud is absorbing. |
Atmosphere
These describe the air column as a whole: how much water it is carrying, where it freezes, and how hard it is pulling moisture out of the ground. The two tables after this one break the same column apart layer by layer.
| Measurement | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Freezing level | 11,975 ft | Height where the air reaches 32°F. Precipitation starting above this falls as snow, and reaches the ground as snow if it has not had time to melt. |
| Precipitable water | 0.33 in | dry air mass — every drop of water in the column above you, as the depth it would make if it all fell at once. An inch is a moist summer day here. |
| Wet bulb | 38.7° | What the temperature would drop to if the air were cooled by evaporation. Matters for snow in winter and for heat stress in summer. |
| Boundary layer | 394 ft | Depth of the churned-up air near the ground. Shallow traps haze and exhaust; deep mixes it away. |
| Vapour pressure deficit | 0.15 kPa | How hard the air is pulling moisture out of plants and soil. High values dry a garden fast. |
| Evapotranspiration | 0.000 inch | Water leaving soil and plants this hour. The reference figure ET₀ is 0.000, which is what irrigation scheduling works from. |
Wind profile
The lowest 180 m, close enough to the ground to matter for wind turbines, spray drift and gusts at the surface. Wind that both speeds up and turns clockwise with height is shear — this is a close-up of the bottom of the table below it.
| Height | Speed | Toward | Temperature |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 m | 4 mp/h | N | 41° |
| 80 m | 14 mp/h | NNE | 49° |
| 120 m | 16 mp/h | NE | 50° |
| 180 m | 24 mp/h | NE | 52° |
The 10 m row shows the 2 m temperature, which is what the surface reading measures.
Vertical profile
The same column, all the way up, at 3 AM. Lower pressure means higher altitude. Heights are above ground. Marked rows are the levels severe-weather forecasting leans on, and they are where the shear figures in the severe weather section come from; rows at or below freezing are shaded.
| Level | Height | Temp | Dew point | Humidity | Cloud | Wind | Toward | Vertical velocity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1000 hPa | 2 m | 47.1° | 38.2° | 71% | 0% | 5 mp/h | N | 0.000 m/s |
| 975 hPa | 213 m | 51.8° | 35.2° | 53% | 0% | 26 mp/h | NE | 0.020 m/s |
| 950 hPa | 430 m | 53.2° | 29.5° | 40% | 0% | 29 mp/h | ENE | 0.020 m/s |
| 925 hPa | 652 m | 52.3° | 28.0° | 39% | 0% | 27 mp/h | ENE | 0.020 m/s |
| 900 hPa | 881 m | 52.9° | 22.3° | 30% | 0% | 23 mp/h | E | 0.020 m/s |
| 850 hPa low-level shear | 1,358 m | 53.5° | 8.4° | 16% | 0% | 13 mp/h | ENE | 0.030 m/s |
| 800 hPa | 1,863 m | 49.3° | -1.3° | 12% | 0% | 11 mp/h | ENE | 0.030 m/s |
| 700 hPa mid-level dry air | 2,955 m | 37.2° | -10.5° | 12% | 0% | 12 mp/h | NE | 0.040 m/s |
| 600 hPa | 4,186 m | 26.7° | -20.5° | 11% | 0% | 22 mp/h | NE | 0.010 m/s |
| 500 hPa steering flow | 5,608 m | 11.0° | -32.7° | 11% | 0% | 31 mp/h | NE | -0.020 m/s |
| 400 hPa | 7,265 m | -16.1° | -40.5° | 27% | 0% | 25 mp/h | NE | -0.010 m/s |
| 300 hPa | 9,281 m | -41.8° | -64.7° | 24% | 0% | 28 mp/h | ENE | 0.040 m/s |
| 250 hPa | 10,497 m | -56.2° | -78.5° | 22% | 0% | 33 mp/h | NE | 0.030 m/s |
| 200 hPa | 11,931 m | -69.7° | -88.8° | 25% | 0% | 37 mp/h | NE | 0.020 m/s |
| 150 hPa | 13,756 m | -75.1° | -111.2° | 6% | 0% | 36 mp/h | E | 0.000 m/s |
| 100 hPa | 16,250 m | -85.9° | -125.4° | 3% | 0% | 43 mp/h | E | 0.000 m/s |
| 70 hPa | 18,421 m | -85.0° | -123.6° | 4% | 0% | 32 mp/h | ESE | 0.000 m/s |
| 50 hPa | 20,468 m | -78.7° | — | 0% | 0% | 22 mp/h | E | -0.040 m/s |
| 30 hPa | 23,687 m | -72.4° | — | 0% | 0% | 17 mp/h | NE | 0.000 m/s |
Blank cells are levels the active model does not publish. The upper levels thin out first.
Weather and air quality by Open-Meteo · Blank values are fields the active model does not publish.