For five years,WFO Jacksonville has been a leader in the implementation of local mesoscale modeling at the forecast office, initially partnering with Florida State University and the Tallahassee WFO, but for the last two years running independently. The initial arguments against local modeling, namely, that it could not be managed at the WFO level and that poor lateral boundary conditions would invalidate the model solution, have both proved false.

Once set up, the Workstation version of the Eta (WSEta) model has proven to be remarkably robust, and with the import of NCEP Eta grids as the lateral boundary conditions for the WSEta, the results have been no worse than the National forecasts, and often substantially improved.

In particular for the Florida convective season, being able to define the sea breeze in the model pressure field has given the WFO forecasters the ability to quantitatively forecast the strength of the sea breeze and the location of the seabreeze convergence with time.

Since this convergence is most often the initiator of the pulse severe convection, this has been a clear advantage in forecasting the general area of the pulse severe activity, as well as enabling improved staffing decisions for these events.

The presentation will provide some examples of how WSEta information has been used at WFO Jacksonville to improve forecast and warning operations.