Live Blog – 5 May 2008 (7:13-7:26pm)

Storms east of the GCK storm appear highly elevated according to Brian. He’s also thinking High downdraft CAPE and dewpoint depressions would depress the tornado threat.

Craig and Brian’s correlating VIL with the report. The VIL’s come down a bit and the latest report is 1″ . Cynthia’s worried the worst hail threat is now too far north of the threat area centroid. But Craig sais the tendency is for propagation to occur to the south.

Brian is also thinking the squall line segment to the south may eventually cutoff inflow to the storm.

Bill’s coming over to help Cynthia update the threat area. Bill’s interested in pulling the north extent of the threat area a little north and rotate the ellipse N-S and stretch it out. Oh, a new MESH product came in and they had to reposition the reshaped threat area to the east a bit.

Upon reconsidering after looping the MESH, they’ll consider a 50 min warning time. Motion uncertainty has been set to 10deg from 277, speed 10kts – uncertainty=5kts. Peak (trend) probability to be set to 55% in 30 min from 95%. So the trend is lower.

Done by 0027 UTC

Jim LaDue (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 5-9 May)

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Live Blog – 5 May 2008 (6:50pm)

We have Cynthia on WDSS-II drafting the threat areas for hail while Bill monitors radar data on D2D. We decided to approach the workload like this in order to reduce the cognitive load of trying to handle new software.

Brian will be working the environmental data.

The GCK storm appears to be a high-based supercell with a significant TBSS as of 20 min ago. Softball hail was observed in GCK 30 min ago.

Jim LaDue (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 5-9 May)

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Live Blog – 5 May 2008 (5:14pm)

Greg has done a walk-through on a live supercell in Woods county, OK for a hail threat. Slow motion of the storm means lots of variation in storm motion direction between the forecasters.

Jim LaDue (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 5-9 May)

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Live Blog – 1 May 2008 (8:28-8:37pm)

MM still working with Lincoln Co storm. Appears to have intensified again, but movement more NE now. Current ProbWarn at peak around 30-40%. MM taking peak probs back up to 50% and moving to 75% at peak (10-20 min from now). Wants to use probabilities to communicate this intensification to the users… Unfortunately, WG crashed just as he was issuing this new warning–working to get it restarted*.

*data will now be in 050208 (2 May) directory since restarting WG after 0000 UTC; will have to merge files later.**

**after getting restarted and dealing with data feed issues, ending probwarn ops for the evening.

Kristin Kuhlman (Gridded Warning Cognizant Scientist)

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Live Blog – 1 May 2008 (8:08pm)

Tornado warnings continue for Lincoln and Pawnee Co. MM is dealing with display issues particularly with the VEL data. NWS is currently letting TOR warning expire for Lincoln Co–believe storm is weakening. ProbWarn probs have decreased to 55%–MM not completely sure storm is uncapable of producing a tornado. TV stations are reporting damage in areas of Oklahoma Co apparently associated with intermittent tornadoes from the storm.

Kristin Kuhlman (Gridded Warning Cognizant Scientist)

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Live Blog – 1 May 2008 (7:56pm)

Looks like the OKC storm is a dry supercell with DRC problems, tilted downshaer, and not much precip in the hook. MM thinks mostly wimpy tornadoes until the storm could possibly interact with higher dewpoint air as it moves to the NE. Visually on the television stations, the storm now has a classic barberpole appearance, but so far, a visible tornado has not yet been seen (even though there have been sporadic reports of damage in rural Oklahoma County).

Greg Stumpf (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 28 April – 2 May)

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Live Blog – 1 May 2008 (7:45-7:52pm)

We’re starting the Live Blog about one hour after the IOP occurred. An isolated supercell developed just west of Norman, and began to track NE. Two more supercells developed north of this storm, near Guthrie and Stillwater. We’re doing a PAR IOP at the moment, as the storms are outside of the CASA network, but we are keeping our eyes open for any additional development to the SW of here. So, for now, Dave B. and Mike C. are working with Pam H. and Les L. on the PAR station. Mike Magsig, our guest evaluator, has decided to do a solo gridded warning exercise on the Oklahoma City supercell. Unfortunately, we discovered a fatal bug in our warning software which forced us to create a build that was slightly old, and which brought back a few of our recently fix bugs.

Greg Stumpf (EWP Weekly Coordinator, 28 April – 2 May)

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Live Blog – 30 April 2008 (6:23pm)

Notes on Gridded Warning Archive Case

Stream of consciousness notes from Mike Cammarata’s exercise:

Getting used to the software. Mike has some experience with this from earlier this week.

“Calibrated” ourselves with the MESH.

Desire to hide/show products more easily.

Would like to know when the next update is expected in displaced realtime case.

Long list of products (mostly warning output grids) became cumbersome to deal with.

At one point, Mike realized that we were encompassing more than the *current* threat area, made that adjustment.

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Group discussion: Mike Cammarata and Patrick Marsh, warning participants (Kristin/Kevin M. pw coords.)

A more informed decision could be made with better technology and guidance tools. For example, storm-following loops and cross-sections (even automated).

Took longer to issue due to polygon drawing (hard to get used to different knobology)

How did we feel about issuing probabilities? Probability was very arbitrary. Mike: “At what level of risk are we going to have a tornado?”

Discussion ensued about difference between achieving GPRA goals and current paradigm of warnings.

Discussion about significant call to action. (Are probs the best way? For tornado?)

Every decision maker has their individual cost-loss ratio for each decision made.

Andy feels that the “public” needs to know when to be told to “duck”.

The big issue is how we can objectively calibrate forecasters to the verification and to each other, so that there is a consistent answer for each warning.

Kevin Manross and Greg Stumpf (Gridded Warning Cognizant Scientists)

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