First off, thanks for the chance to come up there and see this great new tool that hopefully will be available to all forecasters soon.
In my opinion the experiment our week was well run, with the least amount of stress put upon us as forecasters. We had plenty of time to assess the situation for each case study and only 1 hour of “stress”-ful time. But even that time went by fast as weather was relatively easy to focus on. By the nature of the 90 degree wedge, forecasters had already sectorized the workload. It would be interesting to see a case study with a long line of storms with multiple areas of severe weather within that wedge to see how we would have done. Hopefully you got a good amount of detail with the Norman tornado outbreak of a few days ago.
One concern I had on day 1 was having to use a new interface to handle the data. I liked the WDSS-II, as it had a similar feel to FSI. As the week progressed, I got used to using the tools it had available, but I still would have liked to have access to all of the usual procedures I have for storm interrogation. Not sure what the future is for this type of interface within NWS, but I would like to see the experiment going towards whatever we will be using. I will have to say that when I returned to the office and dealt with the subsequent severe weather we had over the last couple of weeks, I did go back to using FSI again to help with storm interrogation as a result of my WDSS-II usage.
It would be interesting to study radar fatigue on dealing with 1 minute data. Since I have been in the weather service, we’ve gone from 5-6 minute updates to 4 minute updates with the 12 series of VCPs. I have noticed this change resulting in less chance to get away from the desk to use the bathroom or get something to eat. Going to new data every minute, or even less than a minute, would make me spend a lot more time interrogating with no down time in between. The easy workaround is to make sure you rotate people working on radar. Our office employs a convective weather operations plan (CWOP) that could be changed around to make sure the event coordinator is mindful of making this type of rotation more quickly.
Speaking of the CWOP, it was fun to work as a team of forecasters making decisions on the warnings. At our last severe weather round table meeting back in March, a “Cadillac” model of operations was introduced into our plan where we would have teams of forecasters making the warning decisions. We would only do this in situations where we have lots of staffing preceding a moderate to high risk day with enough notice to “gather the forces”. When the team decides a warning/statement is warranted, the second forecaster would deal with all of the text needed while the first forecaster maintains radar watch. I thought the experiment went well, and I understood the need you had to hear what our thoughts were in making the warning decisions at the times we were making the warning decisions…to see what products we were using most to make our decisions. However, future tests may need to drop back down to one forecaster analyzing all of the data. Then you would have to do a quick debrief afterward to find out what thoughts went into the warn/no-warn decisions.
Again, I really appreciate the opportunity I had to come over there and see the National Weather Center for the first time as well as work with the next/next generation of radar data. After my FSU upbringing, I became jealous of all that OU’s school of meteorology has to offer with the co-located offices in that building. I could certainly see why Norman is such a popular place for meteorologists.
Ryan Sharp (Lead Forecaster, NWS Louisville KY – 2010 Week 3 Evaluator)