At 2005 UTC, we had a storm merger east of GLD. THe lead supercell was starting to produce a moderate low-level meso and I decided to update my TOR probabilities to start at 50% which happens to be my personal tornado warning threshold. The environment was marginally favorable for meso induced tornadoes and pretty favorable for supercells in general. So my impression of the environment was not great. There were no spotter reports despite potentially good coverage. Thus I kept my tornado warning probabilities just above my threshold and not higher.

Greg and Liz were wondering what made me set a 50% probability of a tornado as a mental threshold of a tornado warning. I replied that I felt that I wanted to be more than half confident that a tornado would occur inside my threat area as it expanded and moved downstream. However I’ve been issuing tornado warning proababilities well before I reached the 50% threshold.

I found another challenge in maintaining my storm motions between threat types for the same storm. I became preoccupied with updating the TOR threat area and storm motion as the storm turned more to the right. After I updated the TOR threat area, I became distracted by an out of date hail threat area with the left mover. However, I should’ve updated the storm motion for the hail threat area for the same storm I had followed with the TOR threat. Since I didn’t, the two motions, and subsequent threat swaths were in totally different directions.

Jim LaDue (EWP Weekly Coordinator-in-Training)