Summary – 28 April 2008

Our first day of operations with our visiting forecasters was a moderate success. The orientation briefing went about 30 minutes long, so we didn’t start WDSSII training until 330pm. This will probably be the norm. Once that was complete, we begin training and briefing on the gridded warning experiment. That didn’t end until about 530pm when we morphed into me demonstrating the gridded warning software on the tail end of the event in NE North Carolina and SE Virginia. We did not have a chance to issue warnings on the major tornadoes that occurred today as they happened before we were ready, but there we did issue a few low-probability tornado warnings on the remaining mesocyclones before they went offshore. Our “IOP” lasted only about 90 minutes and then we had a dinner break. Afterwards, each forecaster was given hands-on training with the gridded warning software, and we ended the day with a 30 minutes discussion, captured nicely by Kristin on the live blog. I also made a few “live blog” entries during our “IOP” that I’ll need to clean up.

No pictures to show today since our “IOP” really wasn’t a true IOP (I operated the software most of the time), and we won’t be using these data in any post-analysis. But we may play back a little of the data at the debriefing on Tuesday.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 28 April – 2 May)

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