Relating Convective Mode Information to SPC Tornado Outlook Verification

The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) has developed a comprehensive forecast verification database, which includes SPC forecasts (watches and convective outlooks), storm reports, and environmental information from observed soundings and objective mesoanalyses. A parallel effort at SPC has been the development of a convective mode database, which includes subjective determinations of parent storm mode for a large number of tornado events from the period 2003-2016. For this project, we have combined these two databases to assess SPC tornado forecast performance as a function of convective mode, examining verification aspects such as probability of detection (POD) and reliability of probabilistic outlooks for events that were composed primarily of right-moving supercells, QLCS, other modes, or a combination of multiple modes. Storm environment information and tornado damage intensity have also been incorporated into this analysis. Implications arising from this analysis for SPC operational forecasts will be discussed.