After the typical culmination of late night hours and technology wrestling matches, the 2011 edition of the Experimental Warning Program’s spring experiment, or EWP2011, gets underway today. We want to welcome our first set of visiting forecasters: Jerilyn Billings (WFO Wichita, KS), Scott Blair (WFO Topeka, KS), Brian Curran (WFO Midland, TX), Andy Taylor (WFO Norman, OK), and Brandon Vincent (WFO, Raleigh, NC).
We are trying a few new things this year:
1) Monday is our dedicated training and orientation day. In the past, we’ve crammed in both training, orientation, and real-time operations on the first days of each operational week, and have felt rushed and in some cases, the forecasters felt unprepared. So we’ve expanded our time dedicated toward our training sessions, and turned the last few hours of the shift into a hands-on get acquainted with the AWIPS software and experimental products session. In addition, we’ve moved our Monday shift back 3 hours (10a-6p) so that our visitors can get started right away on their first day.
2) Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are our only real-time operational shifts. The entire days will be devoted to real-time operations, instead of wrapping up unfinished training from Monday.
3) Our real-time days now feature two overlapping shifts. In an effort to a) emulate the forecast – nowcast – warning decision processes in a WFO, and b) start bridging the gap between the EWP and the Experimental Forecast Program (EFP) of the HWT, we’ve added an early shift. We are splitting our visiting forecasters into two groups, and each group will have opportunities to work both shifts. The early shift runs from 9a-5p and the late shift is our usual 1p-9p. The early shift will issue a morning Area Forecast Discussion (AFD). Between 1p-5p, both shifts will overlap and collaborate on an update to the AFD, as well as being the process of monitoring convective initiation (CI), issuing nowcasts, and eventually warnings, all weather dependent on the forecast/warning area chosen for the day.
4) The EWP and EFP will conduct a joint map discussion at 1pm on the real-time operations days. The EWP will inform the EFP about the previous day’s events, and the EFP and our morning EWP shift will help inform the EWP on the likely areas of warning operations for the afternoon and evening.
Watch here for daily outlooks, live blogging during operations, daily summaries, and an end-of-week summary for the next 5 weeks. Note that we take a holiday the entire week of Memorial Day.
Greg Stumpf, EWP2011 Operations Coordinator