Bill sais this is more intense than standard warning ops for the same event. It’s more mentally challenging. Though he thinks it’s a matter of learning the ropes and it’s not as bad as he thought it’d be.

Craig thinks it could be easier with more familiar software. He’d like it tailored to AWIPS. Good plugin for AWIPS2.

This was a messier day than expected due to mode of initiation and relatively dry boundary layer.

Today started in the middle of a supercell south of MAF. Bill and Kristen didn’t have a tor threat when they started though there was an official tornado warning. They weren’t really concentrating on the tor threat at the time.

There’s an interesting difference in shape of swath vs official warning at 2353 SW of MAF. The official warning polygon was county-centric.

Meanwhile in SE NM there was a supercell initiation with a classic split. The initial storm started with one swath and they followed the right mover with the same swath. The left split popped out of the threat until they recovered with a new swath.

At 0113 UTC, there’s a good example of a continuously updated threat that provided an advantage of leadtime in far eastern NM with the right-moving supercell.

Up with the north team, Craig and Brian, there was the triple point multicell with great promise but didn’t pan out. Meanwhile there was a NE-SW cluster of individual multicells south of LBB that was broadbrushed with a big hail threat area. Brian thought the storms were too pulse-like that precluded producing individual swaths given a one person team. Maybe experience would help. Brian thought the threat area IDs in the dialogue box should be color coded by threat type.

They had merging issues and new areas spawning in this loosely organized cluster of multicells. They issued a wind and tornado threat for some of the multicells exhibiting these signatures southeast of LBB. But I don’t think they would’ve issued a real tor warning.

At 0150 UTC, there’s a continuous swath while there’s a gap in official polygons west of Knox county.

Jim LaDue (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 5-9 May)