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Items 2007 Project boosts storm reports for research
A team of NSSL scientists and students have just completed their 28,000th call to gather reports on hail and wind damage produced by severe thunderstorms. The data collected during the summers of 2006 and 2007 will facilitate the development of decision-making tools that improve forecasts and warnings of severe hail and wind events.
SHAVE, the Severe Hazards Analysis and Verification Experiment, is a unique project that blends high-resolution radar data with geographic information. NSSL scientists identified target data points along a storm’s path using real-time severe weather analysis tools from NSSL’s Warning Decision Support System Integrated Information (WDSS-II) system. The remote verification efforts began immediately following a storm's passage using Google Earth to find phone numbers for businesses, private residences, and farmsteads near the path of the storm. The SHAVE team, which included the University of Oklahoma meteorology students, then made phone calls requesting data that included the amount, location, duration and size of hail, and whether or not the location experienced strong winds.
NSSL researchers are excited about the results. Over 10,800 good data points were gained with 6000 reports of known hail sizes, almost 3000 reports of severe hail, 4,800 “no hail” reports, and 442 wind-related reports. Data from 48 states were collected.
SHAVE also located a 7” hailstone in Dante, SD from a storm that occurred on August 21, 2007. This hailstone, weighing 1lb and measuring 18” in circumference breaks the current South Dakota hailstone record dating back to 1950.
The collected data will accomplish several goals:
- To provide high-resolution verification data for the National Weather Radar Testbed’s (NWRT) Multifunction Phased Array Radar (MPAR)
- To use the data in the development of techniques for probabilistic warnings of severe thunderstorms
- To evaluate the performance of multi-sensor, multi-radar severe weather algorithms
- To associate changes in hail size and wind damage distributions with storm evolution
- To enhance climatological information about severe storm threats in the U.S.
SHAVE 2007 coordinates with and compliments a number of other projects in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed including the NWRT MPAR demonstration, CASA NetRad Experiment, the Hail Size Discrimination Experiement (focusing on aiding in dual-pol radar hail size discrimination), the Probabilistic Warnings Experiment and the Multimedia Storm Database.
Significance: The data collected during SHAVE 2006 and 2007 will facilitate the development of decision-making tools that improve forecasts and warnings of severe hail and wind events.
9/17/07