Outlook – 22 April 2008

Looks like mainly a severe hail event for the southeastern 1/3 of Oklahoma. A cold front moved through Norman this morning, and has stalled about 40 miles to the southeast of Norman.

Already at 3pm CDT, a severe thunderstorm watch has been issued for the warm sector. Low-level and deep-layer shear is marginal today, but there will be plenty of instability today with CAPE approaching 4000 J/kg in the warm sector this afternoon. Therefore, severe hail is the primary concern today.

We plan to operate the PAR and gridded warning experiments today. The PAR data collection will not be restricted to an IOP. However, we will concentrate our gridded warning IOP to 5-9pm. Before then, there are a number of gridded warning issues we need to take care of, including testing the archive case to get it ready for forecaster training. There are also some software fixes to the simulation time sync issues that may be ready today for testing, and we need to hammer on those, probably concentrating on only one or two storms at a time.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 21-25 April)

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