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MDL–NSSL Collaborations
NSSL and the NWS developed a collaborative partnership through the strategic
addition of a Meteorological Development Laboratory scientist located at NSSL. The
role of this scientist is to infuse NSSL's cutting-edge severe weather
warning applications and decision support system development into NWS warning
operations. The result will be improved NWS warning services for the public,
increased detection accuracy, longer lead-times, and fewer false alarms for
tornadoes, flash floods, and other forms of severe convective weather. MDL
is also partnering with NSSL to develop the Experimental Warning Program (EWP)
of the National Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) located in Norman.
Current tasks:
- Collaboration with NSSL scientists to establish a development testbed in
order to prototype new multi-sensor applications to be used in short-fuse (0-1
hour) severe weather warning operations and short-range prediction for NWS
Weather Forecast Offices (WFO). New applications in development include:
- A Multiple-Radar Storm Cell Identification and Tracking (MR-SCIT) algorithm
- New multiple-radar/sensor methods for diagnosing hail probability and size estimates, providing geospatial gridded hail products and time accumulations of hail swaths
- An azimuthal shear product derived from single radar radial velocity data and combined from multiple radars. This product can provide a "Rotation Track" product and has the advantage of providing important tornado warning and ground verification guidance information on both movement of rotating storm signatures and the trends of intensity over time
- A multi-sensor cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning warning application which
fuses multiple-radar data, near-storm-environment data from mesoscale
models (in regions of graupel growth in storms), and real-time CG lightning
data.
- The first AWIPS development workstation has been installed at NSSL to pave
the way for experimental warning decision application testbed locations at
several WFOs. MDL/NSSL is working on new research and software
development for the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS)
decision assistance tools, including multiple-sensor severe weather warning
decision-making applications (detection, diagnosis, and prediction algorithms)
- The Four-Dimensional
Stormcell Investigator (FSI)
,
a novel 4D base radar data analysis tool based on the successful NSSL WDSS-II display. - Rapidly updating experimental multiple-radar/sensor hail and Rotation Tracks and Vertically-integrated total lightning density grids.
- The Four-Dimensional
Stormcell Investigator (FSI)
