Storm Prediction Center (SPC) and National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) Host the 2005 Spring Experiment

The first full week of the Spring Experiment in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed began on Monday, April 25. The Spring Experiment, which is in its sixth year, is a collaborative effort between the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center (SPC) and the Office of Atmospheric Research's (OAR's) National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) which tests promising new meteorological insights and technologies with the goal of creating advances in operational forecasting techniques for hazardous mesoscale weather events.

This year, the Spring Program is focusing on applications of near-cloud resolving WRF (Weather, Research and Forecast) models with 2-4 km grid length received from NCEP's Environmental Modeling Center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and OU-CAPS (University of Oklahoma's Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms). The primary goals during the Spring Experiment are to:

• Assess the utility of near-cloud resolving WRF models to provide more detailed and useful guidance to forecasters on environmental conditions and subsequent thunderstorm development and evolution
• Evaluate the ability of new methods to identify WRF model predicted supercell thunderstorms and determine the correspondence between model supercells and observed supercells
• Identify specific WRF applications most suitable for rapid transfer to SPC operations
• Provide focused feedback to model developers on the performance of the experimental WRF models during severe thunderstorm episodes.

Full-week participants in the program during the first week of operation include Greg Dial (SPC), Harold Brooks (National Severe Storms Laboratory), Mike Foster (WFO Norman), Nelson Seaman (NWSH-OST/Penn State), Jimy Dudhia (National Center for Atmospheric Research), and Brent Shaw (WeatherNews International) and Tom Black (Environmental Modeling Center). The Program will run through June 3. More information about the Experiment can be found at its website: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/Spring_2005/