From 3-5pm, I trained Liz Quoetone, Jim LaDue, and Pail Schlatter on WDSSII. At the end of the training session, I tested a bug fix for the gridded warning software, and now, none of the warnings are automagically disappearing any more! Just a few more small issues, and the software should be ready to go.

Starting around 545pm, we began our gridded warning IOP centered on several storm which developed in NW KS. I spent the first hour explaining the software to Liz and Jim. Then, Jim took over the driver’s seat, followed by Liz, and then we wrapped up at 830pm. Several severe storms developed in the area, including one supercell that was a very large hail producer, and possibly a tornado producer. We issue gridded warnings for both hail and tornado on that storm.

During the event, we decided to try a new thing – live blogging. Jim and Liz put their thoughts on the blog as the event was occurring. I’ve decided that this would be a great idea for the gridded warning experiment. The cognizant scientist and/or one of the forecaster/evaluators should blog live during the IOP to share their thoughts in real time. We’ll try to put these live blog on a separate page in the EWP Blog.

Friday is the first of our end-of-week debriefings at 10am. We really don’t have a firm plan for how we are going to conduct these just yet, so we will probably spend some time discussing how we are going to conduct these weekly debriefings in the following 6 weeks.

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