 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here. I want to make a video today about the forecasting rain forecast available on the website of the Israel Meteorological Service. Its English acronym is the IMS. I was planning on making this video about the Hebrew charts, and then I saw that they actually have them in The website is translated into both English and Arabic, and I have to say they've done a really good job The quality of translations into English among Israeli government institutions is quite variable But this is definitely on the better side. It looks to me like they've Manually translated the forecast. They're very readable in English. So it's very useful websites. I'm a big believer I make these videos about public resources because if you live in Israel your tax dollars are paying for the upkeep and maintenance of Organizations like the IMS and for the resources they make available to the public. So you may as well know about them and use them so regarding rain forecasting in Israel the rainy season is you know a few months Really tends to start getting rainy in December. It's currently January. So I'm checking the rain forecast because as people following this YouTube channel know I make YouTube videos and I generally want to avoid going out when it's too rainy both to protect my equipment and because it's going to be somewhat unpleasant. So there's three different rain maps available on the website now You can see forecasts on the map and you can have these manual forecasts But a lot of weather services also give you access to the raw Models which are basically sort of one of the inputs they used to make forecasts from How do I know about this? I've always been sort of interested in the weather and I actually did an internship in Cork Airport in Ireland many many years ago and spent a couple of days Working with the weather service or observing the work the weather service. I should say so these are the rain forecast Now they've got three different models one is Cosmo One is ECMWF which stands for European Center for Medium Term Weather Forecast and the third one is ICON. I'm just going to go into them to show you how to read them You've also got measurements here. You can see radars And you can see the upper level observations for a tephogram as well as well as surface observations So if you go into you can see the current rain radar now it's currently 1245 You can see the anticipated Rainfall here as you move through the clock But these are the Modeling outputs now you really have to kind of zoom in in order to really sort of make something to start with Cosmo Now the differences are there three different models. That's about as much as I know They present the information a little bit differently, but they usually yield Looks to me anyway somewhat similar information. You can see the output here So the first thing to say is that they time they're issued in appears at the top of The model I put so this is issued a Sunday the 2nd of January 2022 at 00 hours Zulu, so Z stands for Zulu Zulu is An also known as Universal Time Coordinated or UTC and it's a international means of referencing time So it's important to know you might think that is midnight in local time. It's not it's midnight in Zulu So you can easily look up the Zulu offset This is going to change once or twice a year. There's sometimes little gaps between When clocks go back and forward and Zulu So currently we Israel is on the current time as I'm making this video. I'm just going to refresh the tab here It is 13 58 GMT plus 2 and you can actually Google supports the Zulu operator so you can do current time Zulu or you can do current time UTC and You'll get the you'll get the Zulu time, which is the same thing as UTC So we're currently two hours ahead of Zulu So when you're reading this forecast, it's just important to know that this was actually issued at 2 a.m. local time and This is for plus six hours. So it's six hours from midnight Six Zulu, but six Zulu is 8 a.m. So this is the forecast for 8 a.m. In Israel local time This is a forecast for 12 Zulu, which is 2 p.m. local time This is 6 Zulu, which is 8 p.m. local time and this is a 24 hour forecast, which is for zero hours Zulu, which is 2 a.m. local time on Monday morning So given that I make this video at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon here in Israel and local time Sorry 2 o'clock The you know I might be interested in so we're somewhere between these two charts So they're anticipating Between this is how it's going to look at 1200 hours and this is what the rain is going to be at 1800 hours and this is what it's going to be two in the morning. So sort of early afternoon Early evening and night time now what the colors represent is the rate of precipitation accumulating over the course of six hours You can see here the chart says millimeters of precipitation per six hours and it's color-coded the darker blues are It's about three millimeters and then we get into the greens between three to twenty Then the oranges reds and finally the kind of pink shades what you can see on the map here is the green and the little dots of Of yellow are going to be the areas of most precipitation I live in Jerusalem. So it's like somewhere like here on the map So it does look like they're anticipating that the rain Showers are going to move in and accumulate a little bit Are there's going to be cumulative rain here and it's going to get a little bit heavier overnight Then it's clearing So it looks like it's going to be raining throughout the night 800 hours. Sorry 800 local There's going to be More significant rain and then the weather system is going to clear southward And then they're anticipating a 2 a.m. Tomorrow that it's going to be basically no Rain going on in Israel for the next couple of days So that's basically how you can read these forecasts if you go into the ECMWF. It's the same thing It's again millimeters of It says in Hebrew Komot Meshkaim Chazouya Mitz t'Averet L'Kol Shesh Shaot The Millimeter So these are just the same same data essentially just three different models So again, this is just a you know, free resource that the Israel Meteorological Society IMS puts out if you want to get it in Hebrew you can just change The language up at the top of the website here into Hebrew and you can find basically the same Data as well if you go to my put the question Cosmo and this is that the same It's actually the same thing completely even this part in English So hope that video was useful if you're looking to know when it's going to rain in in Israel And how much it's going to rain you can check these freely available resources on the website of the IMS