Weather-Ready Nation; Cooperative Observers; Daily Briefing; Damage/Fatality/Injury Statistics; Forecast Models; GIS Data Portal; NOAA Weather Radio; Publications; SKYWARN Storm Spotters; StormReady; TsunamiReady; EDUCATION . Be A Force of Nature; NWS Education Home; NEWS . NWS News; Events; Social Media; Pubs/Brochures/Booklets ; NWS Media Contacts; SEARCH
The gradient is a fancy word for derivative, or the rate of change of a function. Itâs a vector (a direction to move) that. 1  Points in the direction of greatest increase of a function (intuition on why)  Is zero at a local maximum or local minimum (because there is no single direction of increase)
Like the derivative, the gradient represents the slope of the tangent of the graph of the function. More precisely, the gradient points in the direction of the greatest rate of increase of the function, and its magnitude is the slope of the graph in that direction.