This year the severe thunderstorm season has been very calm so far. Both Mike Soroka and Ronald Acuna Jr. provided key contributions to the team this year and either would make a reasonable choice for team MVP. She wanted to know about the people who make bold economic predictions that carry price tags in the many millions or even billions of dollars. The predictions were written thousands of years ago by the wise, unbiased, tranquil and altruistic sages for the benefits of people. Yes, the country that invented numerical weather prediction and the one that possesses the largest weather research community in the world is moving further back in the pack, with substantial costs to the American people. But the costs of lack of computer power extends to local forecasting as well. High-resolution (1-3 km grid spacing) convective forecasting using advanced numerical models in an ensemble setting, has the potential to greatly improve severe storms’ forecasting in the U.S.

The Data Assisted category will assess how much the accuracy of models is improved by the addition of sparse data. Moreover, the performance and reliability of the seven models are then evaluated by a number of statistical measures. Or they go ahead with IBM deal, with full knowledge that there is little reason for the Chinese to mess with our weather forecast models, particularly since a number of Chinese operational entities use our GFS. These are from the weather station on/at the Mayall 4-meter telescope, which is number 12 in photo above. The old, surface based BL appears to have over 1000 J/Kg CAPE, but with considerable lift required to reach the LFC a bit above 700 mb. This warming event was a prolonged event with prolonged effects that continued to propagate down to the surface until mid February, as the yellows show in the above image. Looking even further out, just for kicks, let’s go over sea surface temperature anomalies, under the surface.

At the same time, temperatures in Colorado have reached over 100F day after day, some all-time high temperature records have been reached, extreme drought is in place, and fires are descending the Front Range of the Rockies into populated areas. The Phoenix sounding is similar and its old boundary layer extends to just above 500 mb – the difference in old boundary layer heights at TWC and PHX lead to a deceptive difference of 4C in 500 mb temperature! Such periods would lead to far less accurate forecasts compared to the European Center. In fact, Cray sold new machinse to the European Center and the German weather service recently. U.S. companies pay the European Center millions of dollars a year to secure the world’s best forecasts, a national embarrassment. And frustratingly, a powerful new weather supercomputer, funded over a year ago by the U.S. But now a year later, NOAA has still not ordered the computer (the National Weather Service is part of NOAA).

But here is the amazing part. Here is another way of viewing the 500 hPa skill, this time for the entire globe and for various forecast projections.. On the other side, roof tiles have been known to crack in a way that the next big storm can blow them away. The image above has become an icon of severe storm photography and was taken by Paul Huffman near Elkhart, Indiana. This is something I have been monitoring for a few days now and honestly its too early to say where this storm will go. I predict a partnership with NASA will be announced. Our representatives should ask her how she will solve the NWS computer acquisition problem, quickly. Unfortunately, the National Weather Service lacks the computer power to do so. But first, the statistics, available from the National Weather Service’s own verification site (the NWS modelers are not hiding anything, give them credit for that!).

But the U.S. National Weather Service’s model, the GFS, has major drop-outs with substantial loss of skill. Here is an evaluation of the skill of major global weather forecasting centers for Northern Hemispheric prediction skill at 5 days for the 500 hPa level (about 18,000 ft) up. Hundreds, if not many thousands, of Americans are dying of weather-related threats, and trillions of dollars of our economic activity is weather sensitive, and we are content with a capacity far inferior to state-of-the art weather forecasting. I doubt it. If we had inferior planes or ships, citizens and congressmen would be screaming from the roof tops. Even though the area was within a tornado watch, all of the thunderstorms and tornadoes occurred far to the north of where we were. The jet stream splits over the same areas we mentioned above, as the subtropical jet stream is forced south along the Gulf Coast and the Pacific jet is pushed north into the Upper Midwest. MIGHT STILL SEE A FEW SHOWERS OR EVEN A STRAY THUNDERSTORM IN THESE SAME AREAS THIS EVENING.