Real-time severe convective weather warning exercises at the Experimental Warning Program 2010 (EWP2010)

The NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed's (HWT) Experimental Warning Program's (EWP) purpose is to bring together National Weather Service (NWS) operational meteorologists, and National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) researchers and developers to test new science, technologies, products, and services designed to improve short-term (0-2 hour) warnings and nowcasts of severe convective weather threats.

The fourth formal spring experiment (known as EWP2010) was conducted during a nine week period at the National Weather Center in Norman, OK. The latter four weeks of the exercise concentrated on a demonstration of experimental multiple-radar and multiple sensor (MRMS) applications as well as proxy GOES-R convection diagnosis and geostationary lightning mapping applications designed to improve severe weather nowcasting and warning decision making.

Seventeen forecasters representing NWS offices nationwide were invited to help evaluate the experimental applications in a simulated forecast office environment. The HWT is equipped with an experimental Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) designed to be "localizable" to any NWS forecast office in the CONUS. During real-time severe weather events, the visiting forecasters issued experimental severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings with AWIPS using the experimental data from the MRMS and GOES-R systems. These experimental warnings are compared to the official NWS warnings for the same events. Feedback was obtained from the forecasters through the use of electronic surveys and discussions which were summarized on the EWP Blog. We will present some of the results of these testbed exercises and discuss the process of transferring these new technologies into official NWS operations.