A Comprehensive Database of Severe Thunderstorm Proximity Soundings Derived From the SPC Mesoscale Analysis System

Proximity soundings have been used for decades in an attempt to quantify severe storm environments.  While these proximity sounding databases have generally required manual intervention, a new extensive database has been developed by automatically extracting proximity soundings for every report of severe thunderstorms in the contiguous United States from 2007 to present day. The soundings are derived using the Storm Prediction Center’s Hourly Mesoscale Analysis System, which combines RUC/RAP model initial-hour upper-air profiles with hourly analyses of observed surface parameters.  This archive of over 200,000 soundings is being used to thoroughly examine severe storm environments in an in-depth manner that was not previously possible. Regional, seasonal, and threat-specific climatologies of severe weather parameters and environments can now be easily produced.  More importantly, the database can also be used to develop and test new severe weather diagnostic parameters by computing and applying them to this massive and diverse proximity sounding dataset.