Public invited to participate in hail observation projectThe National Severe Storms Laboratory serves the nation by working to improve the leadtime and accuracy of severe weather warnings and forecasts in order to save lives and reduce property damage. NSSL scientists are committed to their mission to understand the causes of severe weather and explore new ways to use weather information to assist National Weather Service forecasters and federal, university, and private sector partners.
At NSSL, our basic and applied research focuses on understanding severe weather processes, developing weather observation technology, and improving forecast tools, with emphasis on
IMPROVED FLOOD FORECASTING WITH CI-FLOW
Flooding is often a serious byproduct of land-falling hurricanes, imperiling lives and destroying property and infrastructure. Up to now, there has never been a central clearinghouse for data gathered by atmospheric, river, and ocean modeling systems that might help forecasters predict the individual elements of a coastal storm, such as rain estimates, ocean waves, tidal fluctuations, storm surge and river flows.
Now, a new NOAA forecasting tool known as CI-FLOW (Coastal and Inland-Flooding Observation and Warning) is seeking to change that. CI-FLOW is based on a prototype system that will seamlessly integrate these different modeling systems to produce flood predictions for its first test case: coastal North Carolina during the hurricane season.
WARN ON FORECAST:
FORECASTING SEVERE WEATHER BEFORE THE THREAT IS EVER DETECTED
NOAA's Warn-on-Forecast research project aims to create computer forecasts that accurately predict when and where severe weather will occur in the next hour. If Warn-on-Forecast is successful, forecasters will be able to make history by issuing tornado, severe thunderstorm, and flash flood warnings based on that computer forecast even before storm clouds form. The resulting longer warning lead times could give the public 30 to 60 minutes to take appropriate severe weather safety actions.
The Warn-on-Forecast research project targets NOAA's strategic goals to increase tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood warning lead times to help support a Weather Ready Nation
Learn more :: Warn-on-Forecast backgrounder (.pdf, 2.3 MB)
DUAL POLARIZATION TECHNOLOGY
For over 25 years, NSSL has been a leader and major contributor to the scientific and engineering development of dual-polarized weather radar. This long history of accomplishment is being rewarded as the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) begins the upgrade of all their weather radars with this technology. Dual-polarization technology will give forecasters more confidence to accurately assess weather events because they will have more information to forecast what kind of precipitation there will be and how much. NSSL continues to work with this technology by developing an accurate way to estimate hail size from dual-polarized data, ways to identify when and where freezing rain will occur, and how to measure snow.
2011 Spring Tornado Outbreaks
The tornadoes that occurred during the spring of 2011 were deadly, record-breaking, and heart-breaking. We have gathered together information about some of the most significant outbreaks and how NSSL personnel and research products were involved in assessing the storms.
VORTEX2: A FIELD EXPERIMENT TO STUDY TORNADOES FROM ALL ANGLES
VORTEX2 was the largest tornado research project in history to explore how, when and why tornadoes form. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) supported more than 100 scientists and students and staff from around the world to collect weather measurements around and under a supercell thunderstorm, using a fleet of 10 mobile radars and 70 other instruments all equipped with cutting-edge communication and computer technologies. Much about tornadoes remains a mystery, and researchers hope the data gathered during VORTEX2 will help them better understand tornadoes and lead to further improvements in tornado warning skill.
