SYTYCF

So you think you can forecast?

The atmosphere always has a surprise in store. After much debate about the goodness of the previous days crazy heat burst forecast and the subsequent realization that one occurred in Madison WI, we had some good discussion about what makes a good forecast. These issues always arise. Define good? Is there really one metric that just sums it up? What do people expect from the forecast? Does the forecast add value? Add value relative to what?

Bragging rights?

This was a #seetext kind of day. It was hard to get folks motivated, myself included. This was due to many factors including supercomputer issues and a whole lot of uncertainty in whether storms would form in areas with decent moisture and shear. But after a bit of digging into the maps a few areas presented themselves, including NE and IA into WI, and south Texas. After a bit of debate we decided to tackle the interesting situation along the front and remnant convection in IA and WI.

ID, MT and OR: Oh my

Unlike Dorothy and Toto we were whisked away to Montana ... far from climatology for this time of year.

Efforts centered on diagnosing how this low CAPE low moisture environment would yield severe storms and if those storms did indeed arise if they would be severe. The shear was plentiful and the mountains, and accompanying upslope flow, appeared sufficient and necessary for storms across ID and OR. Montana was its own temptation and indeed I have been thinking all day about model cancer given the robustness of model storms there. Multiple lines of what appeared to be squall lines with UH tracks were present.

Weekly Summary

Well the end of the first week was pretty tough. I think we almost have all the bugs out of the system, managed to pull off a live-blog on Thursday and now here we are with a weekly summary. We managed to learn a few things relating to our goals already, and some of them will not surprise you.