The National Weather Service (NWS) Southern Region Headquarters (SRH) has conducted a successful outreach and education program since 1995. The program, entitled Project TWISTER (Thunderstorm and Weather Interpretation with Student and Teacher Evaluation and Reporting),
has provided high school science students and teachers with an overview of severe thunderstorm formation, behavior, and NWS forecasting and warning operations. Part 1 of this study describes
the 1998 version of Project TWISTER in detail. This part outlines specific enhancements planned for the 1999 and later versions of Project TWISTER recruiting, training, and operations.
In 1997 and 1998, The SRH staff maintained an Internet home page describing Project TWISTER. Several of our 1998 participants learned of and applied for the project after accessing our home page. The home page is informative, but static and not particularly
interactive. For 1999, we plan to include animations and video segments on the home page to provide students a more complete description of the project. We also plan to include some
simple forecasting and warning exercises on the home page's recruiting section, to give potential recruits a feel for the decisions they will be making in the operations.
The most significant enhancements will be made to the training regimen. In past years, the TWISTER training curriculum has been a very time-intensive effort, both for the students and NWS instructors. To make the program more accommodating, we are in the process of
porting the entire training course to our Internet home page. We have already translated the Forecaster's Workbook into HTML, and will do the same with our training presentations. During the fall of 1998, we plan to meet with all sponsoring teachers to determine how the
TWISTER training program, or parts thereof, can be integrated into the science curriculum.
Finally, we plan to improve the forecast and warning operations of TWISTER. SRH will take delivery of the NWS' AWIPS (Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System) technology in the summer of 1998. While AWIPS will not have training mode capabilities when it is
delivered, it will dramatically impact our operations should we encounter actual severe weather during the 1999 project. We plan to expand our inventory of archived cases, should we not have
actual severe weather occurring during the operations. This expansion will include different types of hazardous weather and it will improve the realism of the interaction with storm spotters reporting from the field. These enhancements should make Project TWISTER a viable and
beneficial program for many years to come