Here is our Thank You post for EWP2011, conveying our appreciation to the hard work and long hours put in by our forecasters, developers, and other participants for our spring experiment. Even though we had a short experiment this year owing to a “slight decrease” in funds, the four weeks were successful nonetheless. We had several noteworthy events, the biggest probably being the 24 May 2011 Central Oklahoma tornado outbreak, when our participants were asked to leave the HWT area to go to the NWS storm shelters on the first floor as a tornado dissipated just 2 miles away and debris rained on the building. Our AWIPS1 software worked very well this year, owing to the fact that AWIPSII was still not yet ready for primetime. And the software worked better than ever – of course with most bugs finally being fixed by the end of the experiment.
The biggest expression of thanks goes to our two AWIPS/WES gurus “on loan” from the NWS Warning Decision Training Branch, especially Darrel Kingfield, as well as Ben Baranowski early on (who left WDTB before the start of the experiment). In addition, we had help from the Norman NWS forecast office from Matt Foster. Both Darrel and Matt put in tons of effort getting our AWIPSII system up and running until we found the fatal memory leak that put our AWIPSII aspirations on hold. Greg Stumpf provided AWIPS1 support to format and import the experimental data sets from various sources.
These scientists brought their expertise to the experiment to help guide live operations and playback of archive cases for each of the experiments:
For the Warn-On-Forecast 3D Radar Data Assimilation project we’d like to thank the principle scientists, Travis Smith and Jidong Gao, as well as their support team of Kristin Kuhlman and Kevin Manross (all from CIMMS/NSSL), and David Dowell (GSD).
For the OUN WRF project, they included principle investigators Gabe Garfield (CIMMS/NWS WFO OUN) and David Andra (NWS WFO OUN).
For the GOES-R Proving Ground experimental warning activities, including the Pseudo- Geostationary Lightning Mapping (pglm) array experiment, our thanks go to principle scientists Chris Siewert (CIMMS/SPC) and Kristin Kuhlman (CIMMS/NSSL), along with Wayne Feltz (UW-CIMSS), John Walker (UAH), Geoffrey Stano (NASA/SPoRT), Ralph Petersen (UW-CIMSS), Dan Lindsey (CSU-CIRA), John Mecikalski (UAH), Jason Otkin (UW-CIMSS), Chris Jewett (UAH), Scott Rudlosky (UMD), Lee Cronce (UW-CIMSS), Bob Aune (UW-CIMSS), Jordan Gerth (UW-CIMSS), Lori Schultz (UAH), and Jim Gurka (NESDIS).
We had undergraduate students helping out in some real-time support roles including monitor real-time severe weather reports. They included Alex Wovrosh (Ohio University), as well as Ben Herzog, Brandon Smith, and Sarah Stough (all CIMMS/NSSL).
Next, we’d like to thank out four Weekly Coordinators for keeping operations on track: Kristin Kuhlman, Kevin Manross, Travis Smith, and Greg Stumpf.
We had much IT help from Kevin Manross, Jeff Brogden, Charles Kerr, Vicki Farmer, Karen Cooper, Paul Griffin, Brad Sagowitz, and Greg Stumpf.
The EWP leadership team of Travis Smith and David Andra, along with the other HWT management committee members (Steve Weiss, Jack Kain, Mike Foster, Russ Schneider, and Steve Koch), Stephan Smith, chief of the MDL Decision Assistance Branch, and Steve Goodman of the GOES-R program office, were instrumental in providing the necessary resources to make the EWP spring experiment happen.
Finally, we express a multitude of gratitude to our National Weather Service and international operational meteorologists who traveled to Norman to participate as evaluators in this experiment (and we also thank their local and regional management for providing the personnel). They are:
Jerilyn Billings (WFO Wichita, KS)
Scott Blair (WFO Topeka, KS)
Brian Curran (WFO Midland/Odessa, TX)
Andy Taylor (WFO Norman, OK)
Brandon Vincent (WFO Raleigh, NC)
Kevin Brown (WFO Norman, OK)
Kevin Donofrio (WFO Portland, OR)
Bill Goodman (WFO New York, NY)
Steve Keighton (WFO Blacksburg, VA)
Jessica Schultz (NEXRAD Radar Operations Center)
Jason Jordan (WFO Lubbock, TX)
Daniel Leins (WFO Phoenix, AZ)
Robert Prentice (Warning Decision Training Branch)
Pablo Santos (WFO Miami, FL)
Kevin Smith (WFO Paducah, KY)
Rudolf Kaltenböck (Astrocontrol, Vienna, Austria)
Bill Bunting (WFO Fort Worth, TX)
Chris Buonanno (WFO Little Rock, AR)
Justin Lane (WFO Greenville, SC)
Chris Sohl (WFO Norman, OK)
Pieter Groenemeijer (European Severe Storms Laboratory, Munich, Germany)
Many thanks to everyone, including those we may have inadvertently left off this list. Please let us know if we missed anyone. We can certainly edit this post and include their names later.
The EWP2011 Team