Overview of the 2024 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Experimental Warning Program

The NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) is a joint collaboration between NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, Storm Prediction Center, and National Weather Service (NWS) Norman Weather Forecast Office (WFO). The HWT serves as both a physical space and a conceptual framework for testing and evaluating emerging technologies and findings in a collaborative environment, engaging both researchers and operational end-users. The Experimental Warning Program (EWP) within the HWT focuses on evaluation of products targeting severe convective threats within a timescale of minutes to a few hours, within the typical purview of WFOs and their partners, including local emergency managers and broadcast meteorologists. This presentation overviews the activities within the 2024 EWP season. In total, six different experiments, activities, or focus groups were conducted over 17 experiment weeks. These activities engaged 148 total participants, including 71 NWS forecasters, 55 emergency managers, and 22 broadcast meteorologists. 2024 EWP activities included the Radar Convective Applications experiment, the Convective Outlook Innovations focus groups, the Threats-in-Motion experiment, the Satellite Convective Applications experiment, the Dual-Pol Phased Array Radar activity, and the Watch-to-Warning experiment.