The Cooperative Program for Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET) has produced a variety of training activities via different delivery media aimed at operational meteorologists. As part of the professional development series (PDS) concept being implemented by the National Weather Service Training Center (NWSTC), Operational Support Facility (OSF) and COMET, regionally and locally developed training materials will be incorporated with material produced by the central training centers. Efforts toward this goal have already begun by fostering the development of regional case studies by National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters and including them in the COMET Case Study Library.
The COMET Program has recently produced and delivered teletraining materials for operational forecasters in the NWS and the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (NAVMETOCCOM). As with all of the training the COMET Program provides, most teletraining offerings include case studies to provide forecasters an opportunity to apply the concepts presented in other training materials to real-life scenarios.
As part of the professional development series (PDS) on forecasting severe convection, the COMET staff developed the teletraining component titled Anticipating Storm Evolution: A Case Study Exercise to facilitate the application and discussion of the content presented in the COMET CD-ROM, Anticipating Convective Storm Structure and Evolution, and the Web-based module, Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCS): Squall Lines and Bow Echoes. The case study in the teletraining deals with widespread severe weather over the southeastern United States. This training was so popular with the NWS Southern Region, that the audience was expanded to include 90 additional people from 15 different offices. Making the full data set available through the Cooperative Distributed Interactive Atmospheric Catalog (CODIAC) system as part of the COMET Case Study Library has encouraged cross-utilization of this case.
NWS personnel in the southwestern United States inquired about creating a similar presentation more representative of severe weather in the desert southwest. We teamed up to create such a lesson using an Arizona case and the original MCS teletraining lesson as a template. We were able to help the NWS scientists incorporate their unique content into a useful training package in a relatively short period of time. This southwestern case will also be made available via CODIAC as part of a group of regionally unique cases dealing with severe weather.
With the help of operational meteorologists, we plan to continue efforts to encourage the development of regional and local training and to facilitate the distribution of this training throughout the meteorological community