EWP Blog

Group looks at summary of threat areas during the evening. Greg talks about a way of doing this in the future might be to hand off storm “objects” to next CWA for a more seamless way of doing things. George brings up that the forecaster in the next CWA may very well decide probs are too high and summarily drop them showing a pretty dramatic change across the CWA border. No one issued TORs and discussion was that environment in the area of the storms was not as favorable. Also looks at the storms earlier from DDC was not sampled as well. All had high threat values for hail and wind. Hail reports were upwards of 4 inches with several mesonet sites showing 70+mph winds.

Discussion also brought up the Call to Action statement about tors when in a Tor Watch (NWS Directive). Consider a PW version of this that puts on a low prob tor threat.

Interesting observation that storms tonight moved across a “dry tongue” and seemed to transistion to more of a wind threat. Storms then went back into the moist air and produced more large hail.

LizQ

Followup:

There were some technological challenges to overcome on Tuesday. It appears there might have been a network hiccup or other sort of glitch near the start time of the IOP (6 pm CDT) that caused a chain reaction of other difficulties. First we noticed the NTI switch which controls the situation awareness display was on but the web interface was unresponsive. This required a hard reboot of the switch. Then we noticed we could not add a source in WDSS-II because the source list was empty. The “real time” radar list in Tensor was blank as well. When we would manually type in a radar URL, sometimes we did not get any products back. It seemed the MESH was significantly underestimating the hail threat with some storms as well, so it is possible that algorithm was not “seeing” all the radars either. This required intervention to reset all the radars, which when solved also seemed to help MESH performance. Finally, the fact some products were not updating caused a glitch with the warning generation software, since the current threat areas were attempting to sync to old product valid times.

Kevin Scharfenberg (EWP Backup Weekly Coordinator, 2-6 June)

All three forecasters spent time doing Prob Warn on storms moving out of the Northern Rockies. Primarily used Rapid City radar. In general, group felt comfortable with software and outlined threat areas for hail, some wind, and a tornado at the end. Tomorrow looks like a similar IOP in the evening somewhere with Archive cases during the afternoon.

Liz Quoetone (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 2-6 June)