Recent activities at NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiments

The 2019 Spring Forecasting Experiment SFE2019 was conducted 29 April – 31 May 2019 with participation from forecasters, researchers, and model developers from around the world. This talk will summarize SFE2019 activities and document preliminary results from noteworthy severe weather events, with a particular focus on the 20 May High Risk centered over Oklahoma. SFE2019 highlights included: (1) A newly designed Community Leveraged Unified Ensemble (CLUE), which is a coordinated framework through which our collaborators contribute experimental, convection-allowing model (CAM) guidance to help inform NOAA on optimal designs for future operational CAM ensembles. The 2019 CLUE included subsets with different data assimilation methods, members with different versions of the stand-alone-regional (SAR) FV3, subsets with and without stochastic physics, and a 2.2 km grid-spacing ensemble using the Unified Model, which was contributed by the UK Met Office. The other model systems were contributed by NOAA’s ESRL/Global Systems Division, NSSL, GFDL, and EMC, along with the University of Oklahoma Multi-scale data Assimilation and Predictability (MAP) group and Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS), and NCAR. (2) This marked the 2nd year a newly designed, much improved web interface was used for conducting model evaluations and drawing severe weather outlooks. (3) For the third year, a Warn-on-Forecast prototype was used to issue experimental severe weather outlooks for short lead times, and for the first time this activity was expanded into the evening to more thoroughly utilize the full set of model initializations. (4) Finally, new objective verification scorecard techniques for CAMs and CAM ensembles developed by the Developmental Testbed Center were utilized and tested as part of the broader evaluation process for high resolution modeling systems.