High-resolution storm-scale numerical weather prediction using EnKF for the 8 May 2003 Moore Oklahoma tornadic supercell

On 8 May 2003 a supercell thunderstorm produced an F4 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. The tornadic storm emerged from several convective cells that formed along a dryline in west-central Oklahoma. The life cycle of the Oklahoma City storm was well documented by the KOUN radar, the 10-cm dual-polarization Doppler radar operated by NSSL. The pre-tornadic storm was located within 30 km of the radar, making a good test case for single Doppler analysis and prediction of such an event. This case has previously been the subject of several papers (Dowell et al. 2009, 2010; Hu et al. 2005), and this talk extends previous work by examining the impact from using a high-resolution model for the analyses using both simple and fully three-dimensional mesoscale environments. An ensemble of 30-min forecasts will be created to assess our current capability to predict the tornadogenesis several tens of minutes in advance. Results from these experiments will be compared to the recent work by Dawson et al. (2010) on the Greensburg Kansas 2007 storm where current results show the ability to predict the tornado path with some fidelity 30-45 minutes in advance.