Due to the public holiday on Monday, the second Testbed’s session starts on Tuesday this week. New participants from Poland, Finland, Germany, Austria, UK and USA will try to deal with the difficulty of forecasting severe weather that is going to occur this week in Europe.
This week participants will be supported by Georg Pistotnik and Tomas Pucik from ESTOFEX association. Very interesting expert lecture “An overview of NOAA/NSSL decision assistance tools, current & future capabilities” was presented by Darrel Kingfield from NOAA/NSSL. Darrel approached available NSSL nowcasting tools that support forecasters in making decision and also underlined the importance of adaping warnings visualisation to the needs of society.
A lot of severe thunderstorms occcurred on sunday and monday. During weather briefing our forecasters discussed supercells and bow echo features that occurred in western Europe. Conditions were very supportive for severe weather, very large hail of ~12cm was reported in France while Dusseldorf experienced wind gust of 40m/s. The situation from 1945UTC is presented below:
09.06.2014 1945UTC Meteosat IR BT image with surface observations and PCAPPI.
With the use of radar products, we’ve also analyzed the case of supercell that occurred around 12UTC in western Germany. The classic “hook-echo” shaped structure was detected on the radar in PCAPPI reflectivity. By using VIL product (vertically integrated liquid) it was also possiblie to conclude that the cell was right-moving and high values indicated possiblie hailstorm. As it turned out, numerous reports of large hail reaching up to 4cm were reported in ESWD. We also checked mid-level rotation product and mesocyclone detection algorithm. Although according to the algorithm rotation was not strong, it was detected.
09.06.2014 12UTC VIL track – vertically integrated liquid algorithm (left), PCAPPI reflectivity (center), mid-level rotation track with ESWD reports (right)
Currently ESSL Testbed participants work on day1 & day2 experimental forecasts and nowcasting in central Europe.
This week we are expecting a lot of severe thunderstorms, so participants are going to have a lot of interesting work!
