Forecasters in room looking at weather radar on multiple monitors

The 2023 Spring Experiment

At the height of the spring severe weather season, the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed hosts multiple real-time, forecasting, and warning experiments to evaluate the operational utility of new science, technology, and products. NOAA NSSL, the NOAA National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center  and the NOAA NWS Norman Forecast Office lead the effort. The Spring Experiments are a unique opportunity…

Ice storm damage in central Oklahoma. Image Credit NOAA NSSL & Casey Tarp.

The 2022-23 Winter Weather Experiment

In support of the ongoing mission to improve National Weather Service (NWS) products and services for winter weather, the Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) within the Weather Prediction Center (WPC) will conduct 12th annual Winter Weather Experiment (WWE) during the 2022-2023 winter season. The WWE provides an immersive collaborative research to operations (R2O) experience bringing together members…

woman with teal umbrella walking down a snowy street.

Advancing Probabilistic Prediction of High-Impact Winter Storms through Ensemble NWP and Post-Processing

The Weather Program Office is working with the University of Utah to improve snowstorm prediction capabilities for forecasts 48 hours to 7 days in advance using techniques and advanced ensemble numerical modeling. Researchers are developing and testing new snow-to-liquid-ratio (SLR) algorithms to improve snowfall forecasts derived from numerical modeling systems, and evaluating and improving methods…

Bill Lapenta

Researchers and Forecasters Team Up to Improve Forecasts in the New Hurricane and Ocean Testbed

After a year and a half of concerted effort between NOAA’s National Hurricane Center (NHC), Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), and other NOAA offices, including the Weather Program Office, the Hurricane and Ocean Testbed (HOT) has been successfully re-named (from the Joint Hurricane Testbed) and re-launched in the newly designed William M. Lapenta Laboratory, named in…

2021 Saildrone Hurricane wing-3853

Saildrones Track Hurricanes to Gather Data for Forecast Improvement

In partnership with NOAA, Saildrone Inc. is deploying seven ocean drones to collect data from hurricanes during the 2022 hurricane season with the goal of improving hurricane forecasting.  For the first year, two saildrones will track hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the biggest challenges to hurricane forecasting is predicting rapid intensification, when hurricane…

Image Credit- Authors: Greg Greg Jennrich, David Straus, Muthuvel Chelliah, and Cory Baggett

Ensemble Prediction and Predictability of Extreme Weather via Circulation Regimes

A presentation given at NOAA’s 46th Annual Climate Diagnostics and Prediction Workshop used cluster analysis methods to investigate and forecast circulation regimes impact on weeks 3/4 predictions.  This study demonstrates that the dominant circulation regimes over North America are combinations of teleconnections where the clusters are related to temperature and precipitation anomalies. The computationally efficient…

Photo Credit: NOAA This lone thunderhead quickly blew up just at sunset after a day of monsoonal showers near Williamson Valley, Az. Thunderhead over Table Mountain. Image ID: con00020, NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) Collection Location: Arizona, Williamson valley Photographer: Jeff Stillman Credit: NOAA Weather in Focus Photo Contest 2015

Advances in the Prediction of MJO Teleconnections in the S2S Forecast Systems

A recent study uses novel diagnostics to evaluate the ability of 11 state-of-the-art Subseasonal to Seasonal (S2S) forecast systems to represent the teleconnections of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) and the impact on mid-latitude weather systems and prediction. Several S2S program funded projects contributed to this work. While highlighting where model developments may be most beneficial…

AMS Building

Upcoming Sessions at AMS

The 103rd American Meteorological Society (AMS) Annual Meeting will be a hybrid meeting hosted in Denver, CO, on 8-12 January 2023. Innovative Technological Advances for Mesoscale Observing Systems The scope of this session includes weather- and water-related observations from the surface through the troposphere, with emphasis on the PBL, including in-situ surface, profiling, balloon-borne, radar,…