This is an excerpt from the July 2009 issue of the National Weather Association’s (NWA) Newsletter’s “President’s Message”

I would like to use this edition of the President’s Message to cover a few topics. In mid-May I had the opportunity to spend a week in Norman, OK, participating in the Experimental Warning Program (EWP) as part of the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT). When I was a forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center I earned the nickname “the dry slot” because of my tendency to suppress convection, and it proved true again this year as Oklahoma experienced a week of beautiful cloud free weather (much to my dismay!).  Fortunately, in the EWP you can focus on any part of the country, and there was one good severe weather day in Nebraska where we could issue test warnings.  Also, we went through a number of case studies from earlier in the year that were truly fascinating. The purpose of the EWP is to learn how emerging technologies can improve the warning process. I can only describe what was available to the visiting scientists and forecasters as being like a kid in a candy store.  There was access to Phased Array Radar data with 60 second update times, the highly sensitive Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) radars, the Oklahoma Lightning Mapping Array and The Warning Decision Support System – Integrated Information (WDSS-Il) algorithms and display interface.  The job of the participants was to determine how these tools improved the convective warning process, and let me assure you that they did! We will be having a series of invited talks about this technology at the NWA Annual Meeting in Norfolk so that these exciting datasets be shared with everyone.

Mike Vescio (NWS Pendleton OR – 2009 Week 4 Evaluator; and NWA President)