A Tale of Two Desks: Forecast Edition

During SFE 2016, participants complete a variety of forecast and verification exercises. While some of each day is spent as one large group, such as during the morning hand-analysis of maps and the map discussion, the remainder of the day has participants split into two desks. Each desk has a different focus when issuing forecasts, and completes a different set of daily verification exercises. However, participants rotate between desks throughout the week, ensuring that they get to experience all of the activities SFE 2016 has to offer.

SFE 2016 - Day 1

Well, the first day of SFE 2016 is in the books, and if today is any indication, the next five weeks are going to fly by. There is so much for us to look at each day - one participant summed it up well when they looked at the clock and said, "Wait, it's 3:15 already??"

The 2016 Spring Forecasting Experiment: Get a CLUE

It's once again time for the annual Spring Forecasting Experiment (SFE). As many of you may know, these experiments aim to facilitate collaboration between researchers and forecasters, encouraging researchers to better understand operational forecasting and forecasters to better understand the current capabilities of the most state-of-the-art, experimental numerical guidance systems that may eventually become operational - the number of which is increasing continually.

Andrea landfall and wrap up

We have a unique set of new diagnostic variables for this years experiment in an attempt to extract information about individual hazards. One of those is 0-3km hourly maximum updraft helicity (UH). We decided to add an activity to do tornado probability for the full and 3h periods on Thursday in addition to forecasting the risk in TX in the regular framework.

The aftermath

The forecast challenges this week can easily be summed up by Fridays forecast Moderate risk in Oklahoma and the extension of increased risk through IL. That was our area of focus.  We had the full complement of model guidance, and some experience from days prior about how difficult it is to have confidence in making good areal forecasts and then putting the probabilities in the right 3 hour time windows.

A tale of two ensembles

Thursday morning we awoke to a line of thunderstorms across central OK. Eastern CO had what appeared to be a cold air dam and to the east southeast appeared to be situated a deformation zone. Given the stronger deep layer shear, this small area of convection intensified an a southward moving supercell developed around 12 UTC. This cell and its previous incarnation had dropped a bunch of hail (drifts near Blanchard, and larger hail with the supercell).

Reflections

5/20/13
I couldnt stop watching the news, maybe because I want to see these dedicated rescuers have a small victory by finding survivors. Especially at these schools. Schools. We don't know if these estimates are accurate. [Update: They were not.] We can only hope that some of these families find their loved ones amidst this chaos.