The Multiple-Radar/Multiple-Sensor Severe Weather Products Best Practices Experiment in the HWT

The NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed hosted the Multiple-Radar / Multiple-Sensor Severe weather products Best Practices Experiment (MRMS-SBPE) during April 2014. Visiting forecasters from 8 WFOs provided feedback on the utility of the products, and offered best practices for warning decision making (WDM). This included determining which MRMS products are the most useful for warning decision making, developing optimal AWIPS2 procedures for hail, wind, and tornado warning decision making, determining how MRMS products can be integrated into traditional severe weather diagnosis, and suggesting new MRMS products and display ideas. The Warning Decision Training Branch will use information collected to develop MRMS-Severe training for the field.

In addition, controlled experiments were conducted in order to prove/refute hypotheses that MRMS-Severe products improve warning decision making. During the controlled experiments, the forecasters were divided into two groups, each group with “traditional” data for WDM available in AWIPS2. An experimental group had access to MRMS-Severe products, while the control group did not get the MRMS products. Each group was tasked to perform a combination of severe weather diagnosis exercises and issue severe weather warnings. We will summarize the feedback and the results of the controlled experiments as well as the benefits that this type of experiment can have on testing the value of other products.