octa

See also: octa- and octà

English

Alternative forms

okta

Etymology

See octa-.

Noun

octa (plural octas)

(meteorology) The proportion of the sky that is obscured by clouds, in eighths (one octa means that one eighth of the sky is obscured, two octas that one quarter is obscured, and so on).
- 1935, Indian Science News Association, Science and Culture, Indian Science News Association, Page 93
  It has been shown that most of the flood-rainy days are associatied with 6-8 'octa ScFb, CuSc in the morning and CuSc, ScFb with or without Cb in the afternoon of the previous day.
- 1994, Commission of the European Communities, edited by R. Dogniaux, Prediction of Solar Radiation in Areas With a Specific Microclimate, Kluwer Academic Publishers, →ISBN, page 23:
  This method does not give any information on the distribution of clouds in the sky dome. But it presents the advantage of an objective method by eliminating the source of error due to personal appreciation of the fraction of the sky covered by clouds, as is the case in the classical climatorlogical observation of the cloudiness expressed in octa (N = 0 corresponding to cloudless sky and N = 8, to overcast sky in this scale).
- 1998, Ralf Koppmann, Jochen Rudolph, Atmospheric Measurements During Popcorn: Characterisation of the Photochemistry Over a Rural Area, Springer, page 169:
  In Figure 4 we compare the photolysis frequencies of different processes in scatter plots, including all measurements from the field campaign over a variety of meteorological conditions (χ = 40-90°, 296-380 DU total ozone, 0-8 octa cloud cover, 9-35 °C ambient temperature).