Thursday, May 05, 2016

Go West!

Today, for the first time in the history of the Spring Forecasting Experiment, our domain was west of the Rockies, roughly where the SPC has a marginal risk across Oregon. In prior experiments, computational limitations often prevented extending the domain of the ensembles across the entire contiguous United States. As the eastern two-thirds of the country is climatologically more favorable to severe convective weather, typically the domains would exclude the area west of the Rockies.

Wednesday, May 04, 2016

To Split or Not to Split - that was the question

Yesterday's area of forecast interest was the southeastern United States, corresponding with an upper-level trough and the warm sector ahead of the cold front. Since our first Day 2 forecast was issued for Tuesday, today (Wednesday) was the first day that we could evaluate a Day 2 forecast and see how we did. We also verified our Day 1 forecast for Tuesday. This forecast was a tricky one, as we weren't sure how much severe weather the line of convection would produce. 

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.

Tuesday, May 03, 2016

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??"

Sunday, May 01, 2016

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.