Advances in Convective Hazard Predictions for Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) Ranges

Forecasters at the Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) ranges must address various convective weather challenges such as flash flooding, lightning and severe weather. Forecasters provide tactical support in the 0-1 hr time frame to ensure personnel safety and to protect materiel from damage. During test operations, they provide guidance on weather conditions to the test officer. Forecasters also provide strategic support over a longer time frame to guide test operations on future, expected weather conditions. They also advise range customers about test scheduling up to months in advance. The NCAR Convective Weather group provides decision support systems (DSS) for thunderstorm detection and nowcasting. At the ranges, the DSS include the AutoNowcaster (ANC) or the AutoNowcaster-Lite (AN-Lite). The ANC system is deployed at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and the Redstone Test Center in Alabama. The AN-Lite system is deployed at the Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland, the Electronic Proving Grounds and Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona, the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah and the Cold Regions Test Center in Alaska.

Within the ANC and AN-Lite systems, an application called Trident has been developed to detect and warn of potential flash flooding situations. This application was first deployed at the Yuma Proving Grounds in 2014 and has proven to be a valuable asset to the forecasters. Trident results will be discussed and compared to stream flow gauges that are present at that range. Trident was recently deployed at the other western ranges and early results will be presented. Deployment at Redstone Test Center is planned for late 2018.

A second set of applications, called BoltAlert™ and Indicator Circles, were deployed at all ranges some years ago and are used to warn on current lightning occurrence and nowcast the potential for lightning occurrence in the tactical time frame. Recent enhancements have been made to the applications that include improved anvil lightning detection and the use of GOES-East Geostationary Lighting Mapper (GLM) total lightning data. A third application provides strategic forecasts of lighting potential using the Four Dimensional Weather (4DWX) system based on the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. This application has been deployed in the ANC systems for a number of years and will be deployed within the AN-Lite systems in 2018.

A new application, currently under testing, detects and warns of microburst occurrence using Doppler radar. If proven beneficial, this application will be deployed within the ANC and AN-Lite systems. Preliminary results will be presented.

In this presentation, enhancements and results for all applications will be discussed.