WARNING APPLICATIONS RESEARCH

image of a flooded house

Aggregate hailstone approximately six inches in diameter. The Warning Applications group works on systems that help forecasters detect, monitor and predict the occurrence of severe weather.

 

Related links:

Hazardous Weather Testbed/Experimental Warning Program (HWT/EWP)

The NSSL multi-sensor hail swath application display

The NSSL multi-sensor hail swath application shows the location of potentially large hail.

The Experimental Warning Program's mission is to improve the nation's hazardous weather warning services by bringing together forecasters, researchers, trainers, developers, and user groups to test and evaluate new techniques, applications, observing platforms, and technologies.

SHAVE

The Severe Hail Verification Experiment (SHAVE) is an ongoing project to blend high-resolution radar data with geographic information. The primary objective of the experiment was to collect high temporal and spatial resolution data that describe the distribution of hail sizes, wind damage and flash flooding produced by severe thunderstorms. These data enable several goals, including:

  1. to provide high-resolution verification data for the National Weather Radar Testbed's multi-purpose phased array radar,
  2. to utilize the high-resolution verification data in the development of techniques for probabilistic warnings of severe thunderstorms,
  3. to evaluate the performance of a multi-sensor, multi-radar hail detection algorithm,
  4. to correlate changes in the hail size distribution with storm evolution,
  5. to enhance climatological information about hail in the United States.

The high spatial and temporal resolution of the dataset collected during the project facilitates the development of decision-making tools that improve forecasts and warnings of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, and pave the way for improvements to the historical severe storms database. The project runs approximately from mid-May through mid-August of every year.

Geographic Information System Integration Into Warning Decision-Making and Severe Storm Verification

NSSL uses Google Earth as a way to share experimental severe weather products with other researchers and operational meteorologists for evaluation and feedback. A variety of multi-sensor severe weather products are generated by NSSL and shared to Google Earth users via the internet at http://wdssii.nssl.noaa.gov. These products include CONUS-scale radar reflectivity, Maximum Expected Hail Size, Rotation Tracks of mesocyclones, composite reflectivity, and others. These products, which have a spatial resolution of approximately 1 km by 1 km, are generated every one or two minutes within the Warning Decision Support System – Integrated Information (WDSS-II). The WDSS-II system provides the images in PNG format which may be imported into most Geographic Information Systems software including Google Earth.