The 2018 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Forecasting Experiment

The 2018 Spring Forecasting Experiment (SFE2018) will be 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 to be conducted during the experiment, and document preliminary results from noteworthy severe weather events. Some highlights for SFE2018 will include: (1) A newly designed Community Leveraged Unified Ensemble (CLUE) will be 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 will include a 5- to 10-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 will explore 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) group at the OU. Finally, the United Kingdom Met Office will also contribute a small ensemble of convection-allowing Unified Model forecasts. (2) A newly designed, much improved web interface will be used for conducting model evaluations of CLUE subsets and operational convection-allowing models. (3) For the second year, a Warn-on-Forecast prototype, the NSSL Experimental Warn-on-Forecast System for ensembles (or NEWS-e) will be 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 will be utilized and tested as part of the broader evaluation process for high resolution modeling systems.