Comparison of the SPC Storm-Scale Ensemble of Opportunity to other Convection-Allowing Ensembles for Severe Weather Forecasting

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) has been generating the Storm-Scale Ensemble of Opportunity (SSEO; http://www.spc.noaa.gov/exper/sseo/) in real-time since 2011.  Since that time, the SSEO has proven its utility in SPC operations on a year-round basis and has fared quite well when compared to formally designed convection-allowing ensembles during past Spring Forecasting Experiments (SFEs) in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT).  As such, the SPC SSEO is generally considered the standard against which other convection-allowing ensembles are compared and provides a baseline for the performance of a future operational convection-allowing ensemble.  During the 2016 HWT SFE, a number of ensemble subsets, including ensemble Kalman filter-based systems, from the Community-Leveraged Unified Ensemble (CLUE) were available for comparison with the SSEO.  The results comparing the utility of CLUE subsets to the SSEO for severe weather forecasting will be presented.