Identification

Title

Explicit forecasts of low-level rotation from convection-allowing models for next-day tornado prediction

Abstract

Three diagnostic fields were examined to assess their ability to act as surrogates for tornadoes in a convection-allowing ensemble system run during the spring of 2015. The diagnostics included midlevel (2–5 km AGL) updraft helicity (UH25), low-level (0–3 km AGL) updraft helicity (UH03), and low-level (1 km AGL) vertical relative vorticity (RVORT1). RVORT1 was used as a direct measure of low-level rotation strength. Each storm’s RVORT1 magnitude and near-storm environment properties were extracted from each hour’s forecasts using an object-based approach. The near-storm environments of storm objects with large magnitudes of RVORT1 were very similar to the environments identified as conducive for the development of tornadic supercells in previous proximity sounding-based studies (e.g., low lifted condensation levels and strong low-level shear). This motivated the use of RVORT1 as a direct surrogate for tornadoes, without the need to filter forecasts with environmental information. The relationship between UH25 and UH03 was also explored among the simulated storms; UH03 only exceeded UH25 in storms occurring within low-CAPE/high-shear environments, while UH03 rarely exceeded UH25 in traditional supercell environments. Next-day ensemble surrogate severe probability forecasts (E-SSPFs) for tornadoes were generated using these diagnostics for 92 forecasts, with thresholds based on the number of observed tornado reports. E-SSPFs for tornadoes using RVORT1 and UH03 were more skillful than E-SSPFs using UH25. The UH25 E-SSPFs possessed little skill, regardless of threshold or smoothing length scale. All E-SSPFs suffered from poor sharpness at skillful scales, with few forecast probabilities greater than 40%.

Resource type

document

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7q52rbq

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2016-10-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2016 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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