Anticipating Societal Impacts of Severe Convective Weather Using SPC Forecast Products

NOAA Storm Prediction Center (SPC) forecast products can be utilized to provide additional information with respect to potential societal impacts of severe convective weather. This paper demonstrates one such approach that may be useful to emergency managers when deciding whether to pre-deploy additional emergency personnel or resources before an anticipated severe-weather event.

The approach uses the forecast tornado probabilities from the SPC Convective Outlook as the basis for a weather generator to repeatedly simulate each “tornado day.” Then, each tornado-day simulation is mapped to a population dataset, producing a range of the number of people that might be impacted by tornadoes based on the SPC Convective Outlook.

This paper will demonstrate and verify this approach, and briefly discuss potential uses.