With the first significant tornado of 2010 hitting Oklahoma yesterday, it’s time to resurrect the EWP Blog. We are underway getting the EWP spring experiment going for 2010. This year we will be looking at a lot of new data sets, and the experiment period is longer than ever (9 weeks). We are also planning double the participation of NWS folks this year. Here is the experiment schedule (by week):

Phase I:

12 Apr – 16 Apr: PAR, CASA
19 Apr – 23 Apr: PAR, CASA
26 Apr – 30 Apr: PAR, CASA
3 May – 7 May: CASA
10 May – 14 May: CASA

Phase II:

17 May – 21 May: GOES-R, LMA, MRMS
24 May – 28 May: GOES-R, LMA, MRMS
31 May – 4 June: No operations (Memorial Day week)
7 June – 11 June: GOES-R, LMA, MRMS
14 June – 18 June: GOES-R, LMA, MRMS

In addition, during the latter half of the experiment, we may be ready to introduce the participants to some of the early radar data assimilation work being done for the Warn-On-Forecast program.

More information about each project is available here:  http://ewp.nssl.noaa.gov/2010plans.pdf

The invitation for participants has been sent to all six NWS Regions and we expect to make our decisions by 29 March.

Check back here for more updates.

Greg Stumpf, EWP 2010 Operations Coordinator

After we wrapped up daily operations in the HWT on 12 June 2009, Norman got hit by a weak tornado. While only minor damage occurred, and there were no injuries and deaths, what a way to end our 6 week experiment! This is this year’s EWP Thank You post, expressing our gratitude to the many participants of the Experimental Warning Program’s 2009 spring experiment. This year’s experiment was just as successful as the 2007 and 2008 experiments, and it could not have been carried out without the hard work and long hours of our team of participants.

The biggest expression of thanks goes to our IT Coordinator, Kevin Manross, who put in more hours than anyone else to pull off the experiment. As you will see below, Kevin wore many hats again this year.

Next, we’d like to thank our primary- and co-Weekly Coordinators for keeping operations on track each week: Kiel Ortega, Dale Morris, Jim LaDue, Patrick Burke, Travis Smith, Liz Quoetone, Paul Schlatter, Greg Stumpf, and Kevin Manross.

The cognizant scientists brought their expertise to the experiment to help guide live operations and playback of archive cases for each of the experiments.

For the Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor (MRMS) application experiment, they included NSSL/CIMMS principle investigators Travis Smith and Greg Stumpf, with additional help from NSSL scientists Arthur Witt and Kevin Manross.

For the Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) experiment, they included NSSL/CIMMS scientist Kristin Kuhlman who was the principle investigator, along with visiting scientists Geoffrey Stano (NASA-Huntsville) and Eric Bruning (Univ. Maryland/NESDIS).

For the Phased Array Radar (PAR) experiment, Dr. Pamela Heinselman captained the ship, along with these folks from NSSL, CIMMS, and OU: Dave Preignitz, Ric Adams, Arthur Witt, Rick Hluchan, Adam Smith, and Jennifer Newman.

For the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) experiment was again led by Brenda Phillips (U. Mass.), Jerry Brotzge (OU), and Ellen Bass (U. VA). In addition, we had help from Don Rude (U. VA), David Westbrook (U. Mass.), Cedar League (Univ. Colorado – Colorado Springs), Rachel Butterworth (OU), Corey Potvin (OU), and Vivek Mahale (OU).

We had NSSL IT help from Jeff Brogden, Robert Toomey, Charles Kerr, Villiappa Lakshmanan, Vicki Farmer, Karen Cooper, Paul Griffin, Brad Sagowitz, Brian Schmidt, and Joe Young.

We were also graciously provided AWIPS help from NWS Warning Decision Training Branch scientists Ben Baranowski and Darrel Kingfield.

There were a number of guest evaluators from the NWC that provided expertise: From WDTB, Les Lemon and Veronica Davis, from SPC/CIMMS (and the GOES-R Proving Ground), Chris Siewart, and from Florida State University, Scott Rudlosky.

Undergraduate students who supported our SHAVE efforts were: James Miller (coordinator), Anthony Bain, Jessica Erlingis, Steve Irwin, Erika Kohler, Tiffany Meyer, Corey Mottice, Nicole Ramsey, and Brandon Smith.

The EWP leadership team of Travis Smith and David Andra, along with the other HWT management committee members (Steve Weiss, Jack Kain, Mike Foster, Joe Schaefer, and Jeff Kimpel), and Dr. Stephan Smith, chief of the MDL Decision Assistance Branch, were instrumental in providing the necessary resources to make the EWP spring experiment happen.

Finally, we express a multitude of thanks 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:

Steve Cobb (WFO Lubbock, TX)

Suzanne Fortin (WFO Pleasant Hill, MO)

Gino Izzi (WFO Chicago, IL)

Jeff Michalski (WFO Seattle, WA)

Tom Ainsworth (WFO Juneau, AK)

Chris Wielki (Environment Canada, Edmonton, AB)

Rebecca Schneider (Environment Canada, Montreal, QC)

John Billet (WFO Wakefield, VA)

Kevin Brown (WFO Norman, OK)

Steve Hodanish (WFO Pueblo, CO)

James Cummine (Environment Canada, Winnipeg, MB)

Sarah Wong (Environment Canada, Toronto, ON)

Matthew Kramar (WFO Sterling, VA)

Mike Vescio (WFO Pendleton, OR)

Rob Handel (WFO Peachtree City, GA)

Bill Martin (WFO Glasgow, MT)

Pete Wolf (WFO Jacksonville, FL)

Bill Ward (NWS Pacific Region HQ, Honolulu, HI)

Daniel Nietfeld (WFO Omaha, NE)

Gail Hartfield (WFO Raleigh, NC)

Steve Kieghton (WFO Blacksburg, VA)

Dan Miller (WFO Duluth, MN)

Jenni Rauhala (Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki)

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.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Operations Coordinator)

Pete was working the MR/MS data set for a hail and wind event along a front in Nebraska.

He issued several warnings after looking at the environment, AWIPS all-tilts, AzShear, MESH.  He mentioned that all of the products were basically pointing at large hail — it didn’t matter so much in this case which product you looked at because they all gave the same guidance.  He would be very interested in seeing how the MR/MS products perform on marginal events, or widespread events (more than just a couple of storms) that are more difficult warning decision-making challenges.

Pete has also observed in the past that most of the proxies for hail that are used operationally (and this could be extended to MESH as well) tend to underestimate hail size when the storm-relative flow is relativeley weak (15 kts, or no meso) and storms are vertically stacked due to no separation of hydrometeors.

Travis Smith (Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor PI)

We’re only a few hours away from the shakedown week for the 2009 EWP spring experiment.  Are we ready?  Hmmmmmm…..  Yes, we have made considerable progress, but we’ve got a few more loose ends to tie up before we can say we are 100% prepared.  This is the week where we will go through the motions of a regular operational week, but without visiting forecasters.  Instead, we’ll have some of the local NWC participants play the role of forecaster/evaluators as we test out the systems, technologies, and our operational concepts.  Since we are still a few steps behind our comfort level, our shakedown “week” is now scheduled to begin with our 1pm coordination briefing on Tuesday 21 April (instead of Monday).  Hopefully this extra day (or two?) will give us the extra time to finish putting up all the electronic drywall, paint, and landscaping.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Operations Coordinator)

Yesterday was the first day of spring.  It seems appropriate to kick off spring with our first EWP Blog post of 2009.

We are in the process of planning for the 2009 EWP Spring Experiment a the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) in Norman, OK.  Once again, I will be the Operations Coordinator for the experiment, and Kevin Manross will be the IT Coordinator.  We have a bit of work to do before our first shakedown week, which is less than a month away.  Part of the work will include an update to the content on the EWP Web Page, so stay tuned for that in the coming weeks.

This is the third year for activities in the testbed at the National Weather Center. There will be four primary projects geared toward WFO applications, 1) an evaluation of experimental multiple-radar/sensor gridded severe weather algorithm products using the NSSL Warning Decision Support System II (WDSSII), 2) an evaluation of the 3D Lightning Mapping Arrays (LMA) in Central Oklahoma, Northern Alabama, the DC Metro Area, and possibly East-Central Florida, 3) an evaluation of networked 3-cm radars (CASA) in Central Oklahoma, and 4) an evaluation the phased array radar (PAR) in Norman. We expect the participants to be active in the LMA, CASA, and PAR experiments when severe weather is affecting those domains. The WDSSII multi-radar/sensor algorithm experiment is less dependent on local weather since we can access the needed radar and other data sets remotely for nearly anywhere in the U. S.

As like last year, operational activities will take place during the week Monday through Thursday (1-9 pm), and an end-of-week operations debriefing will be given on Friday (10am-1pm).  We will be posting blog udpates at the beginning of each day to provide a summary of the severe weather forecast and our operations plans that day.  We will also post end-of-day summaries and an end-of-week summary.  Finally, as like last year, we hope to be blogging live during our Intensive Operations Periods (IOP).

Some may notice that our Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) experiment is on hold this spring.  We received a lot of useful feedback last spring, and with that, we are planning to re-tool the experiment for 2010.  The new experiment will take advantage of improved technology (AWIPS2 maturation, better ways to input the information, better ways to derive the grids), improved science (first steps at automated probabilistic guidance and warn-on-forecast), upscale activities (blending WFO short-fused warning information with longer term SPC watch and outlook information), and a social science component (a spectrum of users consuming the information in a variety of ways).

Stay tuned for more updates.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Operations Coordinator)

After we wrapped up daily operations in the HWT on 6 June 2008, I took a 2 week holiday to chase storms and then entertain visiting family members. I’ve spent the last few days back in the office catching up on 9+ weeks of accumulated emails and other assorted and sundry items that have piled up.

I’ve been meaning to make a post expressing my gratitude to the many participants of the Experimental Warning Program’s 2008 spring experiment. This year’s experiment was an order of magnitude larger in terms of effort by these folks than last year’s experiment, and they all deserve many kudos.

The biggest expression of thanks goes to our IT Coordinator, Kevin Manross, who put in more hours than anyone else to pull off the experiment.

Next, I’d like to thank our Weekly Coordinators for keeping operations on track each week: Jim LaDue, Kevin Manross (again!), Travis Smith, Patrick Burke, and Liz Quoetone. There were a few times when we relied on our backup coordinators to fill in when needed: Kevin Scharfenberg and Kiel Ortega.

The cognizant scientists brought their expertise to the experiment to help guide live operations and playback of archive cases for each of the three experiments.

For the Gridded Warning Experiment, they included Kiel Ortega (his software!), Kristin Kuhlman (she shed that rookie hat quickly!), Mike Magsig (lots of these ideas were his), Travis Smith (SWAT’s fearless leader), Angelyn Kolodziej (up and coming star), Les Lemon (the veteran), Kevin Scharfenberg (the “bureaucrat”), and Kevin Manross (once again!).

For the Phased Array Radar (PAR) experiment, Dr. Pamela Heinselman captained the ship, along with Ric Adams, Dr. Rodger Brown, Les Lemon, Kristin Kuhlman, Arthur Witt, Dave Preignitz, Rick Hlucan, and that seemingly available Kevin Manross.

For the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) experiment, the leadership of Brenda Phillips and Jerry Brotzge got us through the storm, or lack there of! Maybe next time we’ll get decent storms in the CASA network during the forecaster shifts, and not the last hour of the last day of the experiment! In addition, we had help from Ellen Bass, Don Rude, David Pepyne, Kurt Hondl, and Patrick Marsh.

We had IT help from Charles Kerr, Vicki Farmer, Karen Cooper, Paul Griffin, Brad Sagowitz, Brian Schmidt, Doug Kennedy, Joe Young, and Darrel Kingfield.

There were a number of guest evaluators from the NWC that provided expertise: Brad Grant, Cynthia Whittier, Paul Schlatter, John Ferree, Patrick Marsh, and Jami Boettcher.

Undergraduate students who supported our SHAVE efforts were: Steve Irwin (coordinator), Jennifer Bowen, Jessica Erlingis, Margaret Frey, Tiffany Meyer, and Kelsey Mulder.

I can’t forget our extra special guest star from the Weather And Society Integrated Studies (WAS*IS) program, Dr. Eve Gruntfest, who spent an exciting week with us in mid-May.

The EWP leadership team of Travis Smith and David Andra, along with the other HWT management committee members (Steve Weiss, Jack Kain, Mike Foster, Joe Schaefer, and Jeff Kimpel), and my MDL boss Dr. Stephan Smith, were instrumental in providing the necessary resources to make the EWP (and EFP) spring experiment happen.

Finally, I express a multitude of thanks to our National Weather Service and international operational meteorologists who traveled to Norman to participate as evaluators in this experiment (and I also thank their local and regional management for providing the personnel). They are:

David Blanchard (WFO Flagstaff, AZ)

Mike Cammarata (WFO Columbia, SC)

Ken Cook (WFO Wichita, KS)

Andy Edman (NWS Western Region HQ)

Bill Rasch (WFO Billings, MT)

Craig Shoemaker (WFO Tucson, AZ)

Bryan Tugwood (Environment Canada, Toronto, ON)

David Schmidt (Environment Canada, Edmonton, AB)

Ria Alsen (Environment Canada, Toronto, ON)

Dave Hotz (WFO Morristown, TN)

Daniel Porter (WFO Albuquerque, NM)

Ron Przybylinski (WFO St. Louis, MO)

Dan Miller (WFO Duluth, MN)

Jonathon Howell (WFO Memphis, TN)

Steve Rogowski (WFO Sterling, VA)

Steve Hodanish (WFO Pueblo, CO)

Ryan Knutsvig (WFO Elko, NV)

Dave Patrick (Environment Canada, Winnipeg, MB)

Eric Stevens (WFO Fairbanks, AK)

Kevin Brown (WFO Norman, OK)

Mark Melsness (Environment Canada, Winnipeg, MB)

Brad Colman (WFO Seattle, WA)

Jon Hitchcock (WFO Buffalo, NY)

George Phillips (WFO Topeka, KS)

Chris Sohl (WFO Norman, OK)

Milovan Radmanovac (Hydrometeorological Service of Serbia)

Many thanks to everyone, including those I may have inadvertently left off this list. Please let me know if I missed anyone. I can certainly edit this post and include their names later.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Operations Coordinator)

I just spent most of the day cleaning up all the entries on the EWP Blog. This included fixing “ownership” of posts and post categories, standardizing the post titles, and re-ordering posts in their correct chronological order. It should make the blog entries easier to read now.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Operations Coordinator)

I am beginning to post feedback from some of our visiting forecaster/evaluator participants. I have pre-dated these posts to match up with the end of the week that each forecaster participate. A quick link to these posts is on the side of this blog, “Forecaster Thoughts”, or you can just click here.

The 2008 EWP scientists will be meeting soon to have a post-mortem “retreat” of sorts to start planning for 2009. Some information may be posted here in the coming days. Also, as we begin to analyze the data, you may see more posts in the future.

Greg Stumpf (2008 EWP Operations Coordinator)

Just so you all know!  It’s a holiday.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Operations Coordinator)

Since some of the damage from last night was across the street from my kids’ school, I set off from there this morning with only a Nokia N95 as assistance. For those who don’t know, this cameraphone is pretty nice:

• 5 megapixel camera (works fine outdoors, though some pics come out a bit blurry it is acceptable)
• built-in GPS
• can geo-tag and upload pictures to Flickr.com with “zonetag” software, for instant viewing by a remote user in Google Earth.

I basically drove around and took pictures with the phone and then uploaded them. It seemed great! Only, when I got back to NSSL, I discovered that it didn’t really go so well:

• GPS locations were not quite accurate due to some sky blockage (big trees). Next time I’ll bring my SIRF3 (highly accurate) bluetooth GPS to connect to the phone, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having built-in GPS!
• At some point, my phone reset, and it lost the GPS logging. Of course, it didn’t tell me this, and even though it was still uploading pictures they were all geotagged to the location where it reset. Oops!
• This meant that I had to manually position the rest of the photos (and remember where I took them) using Google Earth / Picasa to make the KML file.

The practical upshot is that the GPS Logger / regular digital camera survey method will still work better, unless you want to auto-upload your results to a web site.

(Travis Smith)