For the CASA Hazardous Weather Testbed during the week of April 19th – 23rd the emphasis was on continuing to improve our procedures and process while maintaining readiness for possible weather events. As it turned out we did have interesting weather enter the IP1 testbed area on the night of April 22nd – 23rd, but only marginally severe thunderstorms.  No significant circulations were observed.  We added some new tools to our repertoire including a screen capture to Twitter using a Twitpic procedure on the WDSII console (technical issues prevented it from working on the AWIPS terminal). We also built a blogging tool accessible at http://casaradar.blogspot.com that captures information on all emails sent to response@casa.umass.edu (such as forecasts) as well as all tweets sent out by the casaradar and casaalert accounts. The blogger can also be sent email which will post at blogger@casaradar.com.  The CASA HWT Protocols document was updated based on these new tools and procedures as well as experience gained during the previous week of the HWT. On Tuesday we verified all the functionality during a test run using the April 2nd case study.  Wednesday had the potential for storms to enter the testbed after 8PM so we worked on further refinements to tools and procedures during the afternoon. The weather didn’t cooperate so we called it quits around 10PM that day.

On Thursday while we waited for the weather to develop (there were possible testbed incursions in early evening that did not materialize) Don and Steve ran through one of Don’s cases. During the evening hours, Steve ran both the WDSII and AWIPS terminals with Don’s help on setting up and looking at some of the wind products (3DVar, dual-dopppler) and “warn-on-forecast” NWP on web browsers on one monitor of the WDSII terminal. Rachel was the communicator on NWSchat, and monitored spotter locations (including Cedar who was out chasing with EM James Nimrod), and took snapshots of the WDSII and also from Weatherscope for inclusion on Twitter using Twitpic. Westy was monitoring all the tools and CASA system status – everything important went smoothly, although we did lose wireless connectivity to half the laptops (thankfully not the communicator one) around midnight that was fixed by Don’s expert network hacking skills. Despite the storm never really producing anything resembling a tornado or interesting circulation or winds we stuck with it until almost 4AM. On Friday we debriefed and recovered. Don and Steve ran through more of Don’s case.

We appreciate all the volunteer work done by OU folks during the week.

Timeline

Monday: Revised HWT procedures for the week.
Tuesday: Continued work on HWT procedures; worked on new functionality for communicator and technical issues with hardware and software; built CASA blog, with connections to two CASA twitter accounts and an email portal at blogger@casaradar.com Ran through CASA Case Study with Steve and Rachel as communicator.
Wednesday: Continued work on new functionality for communicator. On standby from 3PM on in case there was weather in the testbed. Nothing happened.
Thursday: Don and Steve worked on Don’s case in the early evening. Storm event started around 10PM and ended at 4AM.
Friday: Debrief at noon, Don and Steve continued working on Don’s case.

People
CASA personell: David Westbrook (M-F), Rachel Butterworth (T-F), Brendan Hogan (M-W), Don Rude (Th- Fri), Cedar League (Th-F), Brenda Phillips (M), Ellen Bass (T), Jerry Brotzge (OU)
Forecaster: Steve Hodanish, WFO Pueblo CO (Steve.Hodanish@noaa.gov)
Additional OU support from: Patrick Marsh (NSSL), Greg Stumpf (MDL), Darrel Kingfield (WDTB)

Jerry Brotzge, Univ., Oklahoma CASA Project Scientist