The 2018 NOAA/Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiment

The 2018 Spring Forecasting Experiment (SFE2018) was conducted 30 April – 1 June 2018 with participation from forecasters, researchers, and model developers from around the world. This talk will summarize the activities and cutting-edge model evaluations that were conducted, and document preliminary results from noteworthy severe weather events. Highlights for SFE2018 included: (1) A newly designed Community Leveraged Unified Ensemble (CLUE) was examined and evaluated. The CLUE is a coordinated framework through which our collaborators contribute experimental, convection-allowing model (CAM) guidance to help inform NOAA on optimal designs for future operational CAM ensembles. The 2018 CLUE included a 12-member, convective-scale, mixed-physics FV3 ensemble contributed by the University of Oklahoma (OU) Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, and two deterministic FV3 configurations contributed by the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Additionally, the CLUE explored the impact of stochastic physics, as well as different data assimilation strategies in the High Resolution Rapid Refresh Ensemble, using members contributed by NOAA’s Global System Division of the Earth Systems Research Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Multi-scale data Assimilation and Predictability (MAP) Laboratory at OU. Object-based probabilistic (OBPROB) forecast products were generated from the OU Map ensemble. Finally, the United Kingdom Met Office also contributed two deterministic convection-allowing configurations of their Unified Model. (2) A newly designed, much improved web interface was used for conducting and documenting model evaluations of CLUE subsets and operational convection-allowing models. (3) For the second year, guidance from a Warn-on-Forecast prototype, the NSSL Experimental Warn-on-Forecast System for ensembles (or NEWS-e) was used to issue experimental severe weather outlooks for very short lead times over 1-h time windows. (4) Finally, new objective verification scorecard techniques for CAMs and CAM ensembles developed by the Developmental Testbed Center were utilized and tested as part of the broader evaluation process for high resolution modeling systems.