Monday 5 May 2014 begins the first week of our four-week spring experiment of the 2014 NSSL-NWS Experimental Warning Program (EWP2014) in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed at the National Weather Center in Norman, OK.  There will be two primary projects geared toward WFO applications, 1) a test of a Probabilistic Hazards Information (PHI) prototype, as part of the FACETS program and 2) an evaluation of multiple experimental products (formerly referred to as “The Spring Experiment”).   The latter project – known as “The Big Experiment” – will have three components including a) an evaluation of multiple CONUS GOES-R convective applications, including satellite and lightning;  b) an evaluation of the model performance and forecast utility of two convection-allowing models (the variational Local Analysis Prediction System and the Norman WRF); c) and an evaluation of a new feature tracking tool.  We will also be coordinating with and evaluating the Experimental Forecast Program’s probabilistic severe weather outlooks as guidance for our warning operations.  Operational activities will take place during the week Monday through Friday.

For the week of 5-9 May, our distinguished NWS guests will be John Keyes (WFO Pocatello, ID), Jared Maples (WFO Grand Rapids, MI), Scott Rudge (WFO Rapid City, SD), Kris White (WFO Huntsville, AL), Bruce Thoren (WFO Norman, OK), and Jonathan Wolfe (WFO Charleston, WV).  Additionally, we will be hosting a weather broadcaster to work with the NWS forecasters at the forecast desk.  This week, our distinguished guest will be Daniel Bickford of WSPA-TV (Greenville, SC).  If you see any of these folks walking around the building with a “NOAA Spring Experiment” visitor tag, please welcome them!   The GOES-R program office, the NOAA Global Systems Divisions (GSD), and the National Severe Storms Laboratory have generously provided travel stipends for our participants from NWS forecast offices and television stations nationwide.

Visiting scientists this week will include Steve Goodman (NESDIS), Hongli Jiang (GSD), Paola Salio (Ciudad Universitaria, Buenos Aires, Argentina), Justin Sieglaff (CIMSS), and Ed Szoke (GSD).

Kristin Calhoun will be the weekly coordinator.  Lance VandenBoogart (WDTB) will be our “Tales from the Testbed” Webinar facilitator. Our support team also includes Darrel Kingfield, Gabe Garfield, Bill Line, Chris Karstens, Greg Stumpf,  Karen Cooper, Vicki Farmer, Lans Rothfusz, Travis Smith, Aaron Anderson, and David Andra.

Here are several links of interest:

You can learn more about the EWP here:

https://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/

NOAA employees can access the internal EWP2014 page with their LDAP credentials:

https://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/ewp/internal/2014/

Gabe Garfield
CIMMS/NWS OUN
2014 EWP Operations Coordinator

Monday 21 April 2014 begins the second week of our two-week Multiple-Radar/Multiple-Sensor Best Practices experiment in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed at the National Weather Center in Norman, OK.  This project is designed to include forecasters in the process of developing training for the Warning Decision Training Branch in how to best use MRMS severe weather products to improve warning decision making.  Through a series of controlled experiments using archive and real-time data, forecasters will also help provide data to prove several hypotheses that MRMS products will provide better warnings for the public.  Operational activities will take place during the week Monday through Friday.

For the week of 21-25 April, our distinguished NWS guests will be Ray Wolf (WFO Davenport, IA), Rod Donavon (WFO Des Moines, IA), Ashley Sears (WFO New York, NY), and Darren Van Cleave (WFO Sacramento, CA).  If you see any of these folks walking around the building, please welcome them!   The National Severe Storms Laboratory has generously provided travel stipends for our participants from NWS forecast offices nationwide.

Our support team also includes Matt Elliott, Darrel Kingfield, Jim Ladue, Bobby Prentice, and Greg Stumpf.

Here are several links of interest:

You can learn more about the EWP here:

https://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/

NOAA employees can access the internal EWP2014 page with their LDAP credentials:

https://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/ewp/internal/2014/

Gabe Garfield
CIMMS/NWS OUN
2014 EWP Operations Coordinator

Monday 7 April 2014 begins the first week of our two-week Multiple-Radar/Multiple-Sensor Best Practices experiment in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed at the National Weather Center in Norman, OK.  This project is designed to include forecasters in the process of developing training for the Warning Decision Training Branch in how to best use MRMS severe weather products to improve warning decision making.  Through a series of controlled experiments using archive and real-time data, forecasters will also help provide data to prove several hypotheses that MRMS products will provide better warnings for the public.  Operational activities will take place during the week Monday through Friday.

For the week of 7-11 April, our distinguished NWS guests will be Kevin Brown (WFO Norman, OK), Pat Spoden (WFO Paducah, KY), Michael Dangelo (WFO State College, PA), and Jacob Beitlich (WFO Minneapolis, MN).  The National Severe Storms Laboratory has generously provided travel stipends for our participants from NWS forecast offices nationwide.

Our support team also includes Matt Elliott, Darrel Kingfield, Jim Ladue, Bobby Prentice, and Greg Stumpf.  

Here are several links of interest:

You can learn more about the EWP here:

https://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/

NOAA employees can access the internal EWP2014 page with their LDAP credentials:

https://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/ewp/internal/2014/

Here we go!

Gabe Garfield
CIMMS/NWS OUN
2014 EWP Operations Coordinator

Click here, and navigate the picture!

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=a9d2d6da-4598-46df-8109-e87b38d8a7b0

Greg Stumpf, EWP2013 Operations Coordinator

Monday 6 May 2013 begins the first week of our three-week spring experiment of the 2013 NSSL-NWS Experimental Warning Program (EWP2013) in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed at the National Weather Center in Norman, OK.  There will be five primary projects geared toward WFO applications, 1) the development of “best practices” for using Multiple-Radar/Multiple-Sensor (MRMS) severe weather products in warning operations, 2) an evaluation of a dual-polarization Hail Size Discrimination Algorithm (HSDA), 3) an evaluation of model performance and forecast utility of the OUN WRF when operations are expected in the Southern Plains, 4) an evaluation of the Local Analysis Prediction System (LAPS) Space and Time Multiscale Analysis System (STMAS), and 5) an evaluation of multiple CONUS GOES-R convective applications, including pseudo-geostationary lightning mapper products when operations are expected within the Lightning Mapping Array domains (OK, w-TX, AL, DC, FL, se-TX, ne-CO).  We will also be coordinating with and evaluating the EFP’s probabilistic severe weather outlooks as guidance for our warning operations.  Operational activities will take place during the week Monday through Friday.

For the week of 6-10 May, our distinguished NWS guests will be Marc Austin (WFO Norman, OK), Hayden Frank (WFO Boston, MA), Jonathan Guseman (WFO Lubbock, TX), Nick Hampshire(WFO Fort Worth, TX), Andy Hatzos (WFO Wilmington, OH), and Jonathan Kurtz (WFO Norman, OK).  The GOES-R program office, the NOAA Global Systems Divisions (GSD), and NWS WFO Huntsville’s Applications Integration Meteorologist (AIM) Program have generously provided travel stipends for our participants from NWS forecast offices nationwide.

Visiting scientists this week will include Lee Cronce (Univ. Wisconsin), Geoffrey Stano (NASA-SPoRT), Isidora Jankov (NOAA/GSD), and Amanda Terberg (NWS Air Weather Center GOES-R Liaison).

Gabe Garfield will be the weekly coordinator.  Clark Payne (WDTB) will be our “Tales from the Testbed” Webinar facilitator. Our support team also includes Darrel Kingfield, Kristin Calhoun, Travis Smith, Chris Karstens, Greg Stumpf, Kiel Ortega, Karen Cooper, Lans Rothfusz, Aaron Anderson, and David Andra.

Each Friday of the experiment (10 May, 17 May, 24 May), from 1200-1240pm CDT, the WDTB will be hosting a weekly Webinar called “Tales From the Testbed”.  These will be forecaster-led, and each forecaster will summarize their biggest takeaway from their week of participation in EWP2013.  The audience is for anyone with an interest in what we are doing to improve NWS severe weather warnings.  New for EWP2013, there will be pre-specified weekly topics.  This is meant to keep the material fresh for each subsequent week, and to maintain the audience participation levels throughout the experiment.  The weekly schedule:

Week 1:  GOES-R; pGLM

Week 2:  MRMS, HSDA

Week 3:  EFP outlooks, OUN WRF, LAPS

One final post-experiment Webinar will be delivered to the National Weather Association and the Research and Innovation Transition Team (RITT) in June.  This Webinar will be a combined effort of both sides of the Hazardous Weather Testbed (EFP and EWP).

Here are several links of interest:

You can learn more about the EWP here:

http://hwt.nssl.noaa.gov/ewp/

NOAA employees can access the internal EWP2013 page with their LDAP credentials.

https://secure.nssl.noaa.gov/projects/ewp2013/

Stay tuned on the blog for more information, daily outlooks and summaries, live blogging, and end-of-week summaries as we get underway on Monday 6 May!

Greg Stumpf, CIMMS/NWS-MDL, EWP2013 Operations Coordinator

Here is our Thank You post for EWP2012, expressing our gratitude 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 quiet severe weather season this year, we found storms on pretty much all the operational days in the five weeks we operated.  This was the first year we used AWIPS2, and it was a great success and mostly-well received by our participants and staff.

The biggest expression of thanks goes to our new full-time AWIPS2 support person Darrel Kingfield(CIMMS/NSSL), who put in many extra hours to pull off the transition to the new software.  AWIPS2 performed very well, both due to Darrel’s efforts, and the fact that it is a better software package than AWIPS1.

These scientists brought their expertise to the experiment and were available to observe live operations and provide support to our visitors:

For the Warn-On-Forecast 3D Radar Data Assimilation project we’d like to thank the principle scientists, Travis Smith (CIMMS/NSSL), Kristin Calhoun (CIMMS/NSSL), and Jidong Gao (NSSL).

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 Calhoun (CIMMS/NSSL), along with John Walker (UAH), Chris Jewett (UAH), Lori Schultz (UAH), Wayne Feltz (UW-CIMSS), Justin Sieglaff (UW-CIMSS), Lee Cronce (UW-CIMSS), Bob Aune (UW-CIMSS), Jordan Gerth (UW-CIMSS), Dan Lindsey (CSU-CIRA), Amanda Terborg (GOES-R AWC liaison, Kansas City, MO), and Chad Gravelle (GOES-R NWSTC liaison, Kansas City, MO).

We had undergraduate students helping out in some real-time support roles including monitor real-time severe weather reports.  They included Bethany Hardzinski, Madison Miller, Christopher Reidel, Craig Schwer, and Jennifer Tate (all CIMMS/NSSL).

Next, we’d like to thank out Weekly Coordinators for keeping operations on track: Greg Stumpf (CIMMS/NWS-MDL), Jim LaDue (NWS/WDTB), Kristin Calhoun (CIMMS/NSSL), Travis Smith (CIMMS/NSSL), and Gabe Garfield (CIMMS/NWS WFO OUN), as well as “guest” co-coordinator, Chris Karstens (Iowa State University).

We also want to thank our overall EWP2012 Operations Coordinator who handled the experiment logistics, Greg Stumpf (CIMMS/NWS-MDL).

The following individuals from NWS/WDTB were instrumental in facilitating the “Tales From the Testbed” Webinars:  Clark Payne, Robert Prentice, Mark Sessing, and  Steve Martinaitis. And thanks to Ed Mahoney for spearheading the idea.

We had IT help from Aaron Anderson (NWS/WFO Norman, OK), Jeff Brogden (CIMMS/NSSL), Karen Cooper (INDUS/NSSL), Vicki Farmer (INDUS/NSSL), Paul Griffin (NSSL), Darrel Kingfield (CIMMS/NSSL), Brad Sagowitz (NSSL), and Greg Stumpf (CIMMS/NWS-MDL).

Public Relations were handled by Susan Cobb (CIMMS/NSSL) and Keli Pirtle (NSSL).

The EWP leadership team of Travis Smith (CIMMS/NSSL) and David Andra (NWS/WFO Norman, OK), along with the other HWT management committee members (Steve Weiss (SPC), Jack Kain (NSSL), Mike Foster (NWS/WFO Norman, OK), Russ Schneider (SPC), and Steve Koch (NSSL), Stephan Smith (MDL Decision Assistance Branch), Steve Goodman (GOES-R program office), and Jeff Waldstreicher (NWS Eastern Region Headquarters and Decision Support Services Pilot Project) were all 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:

Marc Austin (WFO, Norman, OK)

Ryan Barnes (WFO, Norman, OK)

Brian Carcione (WFO, Huntsville, AL)

Dave Carlsen (Environment Canada)

Todd Dankers (WFO, Denver, CO)

Michael Dutter (WFO, Marquette, MI)

Jeff Garmon (WFO, Mobile, AL)

Rich Grumm (WFO, State College, PA)

Matt Hirsch (WFO, Phoenix, AZ)

Jeffrey Hovis (WFO, Charleston, WV)

Ty Judd (WFO, Norman, OK)

Stephen Kearney (CWSU, Kansas City, MO)

Andy Kleinsasser (WFO, Wichita, KS)

Chris Leonardi (WFO, Charleston, WV)

James McCormick (AFWA, Offutt AFB, Omaha, NE)

Chris McKinney (WFO, Houston, TX)

Steve Nelson (WFO, Peachtree City, GA)

Roland Nuñez (CWSU, Houston, TX)

Jennifer Palucki (WFO, Albuquerque, NM)

Julia Ruthford (WFO, Charleston, WV)

Andrea Schoettmer (WFO, Louisville, KY)

Kristen Schuler (CWSU, Kansas City, MO)

Randy Skov (CWSU, Atlanta, GA)

Gary Skwira (WFO, Lubbock, TX)

Gordon Strassberg (CWSU, New York, NY)

Tim Tinsley (WFO, Brownsville, TX)

Helge Tuschy (Deutscher Wetterdienst, Germany)

Kathrin Wapler (Deutscher Wetterdienst, 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 EWP2012 Team

We are in the process of getting the final preparations ready for the EWP2012 spring experiment.  Like in 2011, there will be three primary projects geared toward WFO applications, 1) evaluation of 3DVAR multi-radar real-time data assimilation fields being developed for the Warn-On-Forecast initiative, 2)  evaluation of model performance and forecast utility of the OUN WRF when operations are expected in the Southern Plains, and 3)  evaluation of multiple CONUS GOES-R convective applications, including pseudo-geostationary lightning mapper products when operations are expected within the Lightning Mapping Array domains (OK-TX, AL, DC, FL).  We will be conducting EWP2012 for five weeks total (Monday – Friday), from 7 May through 15 June (Memorial Day week excluded).

New for this year, we will be conducting our operations using the AWIPS2 platform.  For most of our visiting forecasters, this will be the first time they will use AWIPS2 for real-time operations, and we hope to get some feedback on its utility.  Also new for this year, we are going to attempt a “flexible” shift schedule on Tue, Wed, Thu.  A the end of the prior day’s shift, we take a look at the Day 2 outlook and forecast models and make a best guess at determining the timing and location of the follow day events.  Our flex shifts will begin anytime between 12-3pm and end 8 hours later.  This will allow us a better opportunity to catch severe weather events that had peaks outside our normal operating hours in the past.

We’ve “reclaimed” our Mondays as a real-time operations day.  In the past, this day was mostly spent providing training and orientation to the visiting forecasters, and if there were any real-time events, we might not have the opportunity to work them.  New for this year, the forecasters are taking the training at their WFOs/CWSUs before they arrive in Norman, via a series of self-paced presentations, Articulates, and a WES Virtual Machine case with most of the experimental products included.

Finally, each Friday of the experiment (11 May, 18 May, 25 May, 8 June, 15 June), from 12-1pm CDT, the WDTB will be hosting a weekly Webinar called “Tales From the Testbed”.  These will be forecaster-led, and each forecaster will summarize their biggest takeaway from their week of participation in EWP2012.  The audience is for anyone with an interest in what we are doing to improve NWS severe weather warnings.

So stay tuned on the blog for more information, daily outlooks and summaries, live blogging, and end-of-week summaries as we get underway on Monday 7 May!

Greg Stumpf, EWP2012 Operations Coordinator

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

As one might expect the output from the 3DVAR data assimilation is only as good as the radar data that goes into it.  This was seen clearly with tonight’s storms near the Wichita radar (KICT).

Below are displays of both the vorticity (at 2.25km) and vertical velocity (at 8km) at 2345 UTC.  At this time, the storm was just to the north of KICT and was well-sampled by the radar including good data from the inflow region as well.

However, just 20 min later at 0005 UTC, the 3DVAR vertical velocity field developed a suspicious updraft southeast of the radar and the storm cluster:

The reason for this updraft may actually have been side-lobe contamination due to anvil spread SE over the radar.  Velocity data from KICT shows this area of suspect data — the signal was continuous in both height (through almost all tilts) and time (for about 15 min).  The below image is just one example from this time:

The solution for the velocity data lead to convergence in the area and a false updraft.

Unfortunately, the output from data assimilation is only as good as the radar data brought in and this specific type error is extremely hard for even the best quality control algorithms to remove…

-Kristin Kuhlman (3DVAR scientist week 4)