As we enter spring and severe weather begins to ramp up, NOAA’s research project Warn-on-Forecast aims to increase the lead time for tornado, severe thunderstorm, and flash flood warnings
Traditionally, warnings have been based on detection or indicators of severe weather hazards using Doppler radars, but this “warn-on-detection” approach has reached a plateau.
Now, NOAA compiles satellite, radar, and surface observations and puts that data into a high-resolution model that updates every half hour and makes probabilistic predictions of individual thunderstorms out to six hours in advance, with the goal of issuing warnings up to an hour ahead of time. Currently, the WoFS is run over a limited region of the country and is only run on select days of interest.
This technology has been in development for nearly a decade, and is planned for expansion and more operational use in the coming years. Last year, WoFS was used for the strongest and deadliest tornado in the United States – the Greenfield, Iowa EF-4 tornado.
NWS meteorologists on duty that day said the model gave them high confidence that they were going to have long track supercells capable of producing tornadoes, and that each successive model run gave them higher confidence of the corridor they expected those most intense storms to form.
As this technology continues to be fine-tuned, NOAA hopes that it will increase lead times, and reduce the loss of life, injury, and property.
