SUMMARY:

Week #3  of EWP2010 wrapped up with continued PARISE and CASA experimentation.  Another week without severe weather in Central Oklahoma during the EWP operational shifts left participants going through exercises with archived data.  A summary of each experiment follows:

CASA:

During the week, CASA hosted the following National Weather Service participant:  Ron Przybylinski (WFO St. Louis, MO)

A lack of severe weather during week #3 once again allowed ample time for careful review of archived case studies.  Monday was spent reviewing CASA operations, forecaster-emergency manager communications, and familiarization of CASA visualization and scanning tools.  The remainder of the week was used for reviewing archived events and running through Don Rude’s comparison cases.

Many archived events were reviewed in displaced real-time, allowing for more “true-to-life” operational scenarios.  Topics raised throughout the week included emergency manager operations, data overload, multi-radar visualization, multi-sensor products, and NWP (“Warn-on-Forecast”) output.    A number of details arose within the case studies that confirmed conceptual models, and yet many details may require some refining of those models.  Data collected from CASA may shed new light on the damage caused by small-scale (non-tornadic?) vortices and raise new questions about how to warn on such features.  One key takeaway: Many storm features simply are not visible in the current WSR-88D network configuration. The low-level sampling and spatial resolution, as demonstrated by the CASA testbed, highlight many storm details that may be critical for future improvements in NWS warning capability.

The CASA experiment continues for two more weeks in the testbed before wrapping up for the spring.

PARISE:

During the week, PARISE hosted the following National Weather Service participants:  Ernie Ostuno (WFO Grand Rapids, MI), Jennifer Palucki (WFO Albuquerque, NM), Ryan Sharp (WFO Louisville, KY), Kathy Torgerson (WFO Pueblo, CO).

With this final set of four NWS forecasters, the PARISE experiment repeated their exercise from Weeks 1 and 2.  As in Weeks 1 and 2, there were no real-time PAR data collection opportunities, so all exercises were conducted with archive case data sets.

With this third week, PARISE has concluded its activities in the testbed for the spring.  In several weeks, an end-of-experiment quick summary will be prepared by the PARISE principle scientists.

A LOOK AHEAD:

Beginning 17 May, we will begin the second phase of our spring activities with two new experiments, a) an evaluation of experimental Multiple-Radar/Multiple-Sensor (MRMS) severe weather algorithm products, and b) an evaluation of GOES-R convective initiation and lightning mapping products.

Greg Stumpf, EWP2010 Operations Coordinator

Jerry Brotzge, CASA Scientist

Pamela Heinselman, PAR Scientist