Ramblings of a Graduate Student

For the past few weeks I’ve alluded to the fact I will have an extremely active spring.  I’m involved in both VORTEX II (although my role has continued to evolve over the last few days) and the Experimental Forecast Program (a joint experiment hosted by the National Severe Storms Laboratory [NSSL] and the Storm Prediction Center [SPC] and held in the Hazardous Weather Testbed [HWT; I’m the one in the blue shirt in the image on the upper right!)  This year’s experiment will have collaborators from the Aviation Weather Center (AWC) in Kansas City, MO and the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center (HPC) in the Washington D.C. / Silver Springs, MD area.

In preparation of this year’s experiment I was on a teleconference this morning with HPC and SPC so tonight I thought it appropriate to display a graphic produced by HPC.  Above is the forecast precipitation totals over the next 5 days.  As you can see, heavy rain is forecast for places that were hit hard by last weekend’s tornado outbreak.  This does not bode well for cleanup efforts.  This heavy precipitation is the result of another slow moving trough (#4 in last night’s post) that will move through the southeast late in the week into the weekend.

As some of you know, I’m heavily involved in the VORTEX II project, which this year begins on 1 May and runs until 15 June.  Additionally, I’m heavily involved in the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and Storm Prediction Center (SPC) Experimental Forecast Program (EFP) which begins 17 May and runs through 18 June.  As you can imagine, I’m up to my eyeballs with respect to all the things that still have to get finished before the start of these projects.  Since the weather has been rather tranquil of late, I’ve tried to get a lot of work done for VORTEX II and the NSSL/SPC EFP.  This way, when the weather becomes active again, I can devote some attention to the blog.  (Yes, this is why the blog posts have been rather short of late.)

The image above is screenshot of one of the projects I’m working on for VORTEX II.  It takes some of the data feeds we have here at the NSSL and SPC (particularly the mesoanalysis data) and converts into an overlay for the Gibson Ridge radar viewer(s).  The image above depicts the amount of Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE).  A simple way to understand CAPE is that the greater the amount of CAPE, the more energy thunderstorms have available to them.  Thus, they can become stronger. However, a large CAPE value does not mean a thunderstorm will develop (just look at the image above; the storms aren’t located in the maximum CAPE values!).  That’s an entirely different question altogether!  This tool will be one of many used by VORTEX II personnel in trying to identify where the strongest thunderstorms will develop, and differentiate between those that are more likely to produce tornadoes and those that are not.

For the past two years I have *theoretically* been working on a PhD dissertation in the realm of climate change science – namely, investigating the potential affects of anthropogenic climate change on severe thunderstorm environments.  My advisers have been world-renowned scientists in either climate change or severe thunderstorm environments.  The downside to all of this is that one of my advisers now lives in Australia, and the other is a scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.  Both of these scientists are incredibly busy and it makes things difficult for a graduate student needing mentorship and guidance.

All of that is background information to justify my recent decision to change my dissertation topic.  I’m leaving the climate change sciences (for the time being) and coming back to my true love…severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.  I don’t have a specific topic at the moment, but I do have a general area I’d like to do research – southeast US, cool-season severe weather events.  To the non-meteorologists, this might seem a bit boring, but it is actually one of the more fascinating, and incredibly difficult / complex problems remaining in severe thunderstorm and tornado forecasting.  A disproportionate number of tornado fatalities occur in the southeast United States, most occurring in what is typically referred to as the “cool-season” (roughly late October through March). (The 5 February 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak is a perfect example of a southeast US cool-season tornado outbreak – 55 fatalities in 4 states).  There is a lot of speculation as to why there is such a high number of fatalities (socio-economic reasons, nighttime tornadoes, etc), but none of this speculation helps with improving forecast skill in these areas, and almost certainly doesn’t matter to the residents affected by these events.

My current plan is to spend the next month or two identifying exactly what are some of the problems in forecasting these events, and then write a short 10-15 page summary of my findings and what I plan to do to address the scientific questions I raise.  After this, I’ll present a seminar to the National Weather Center detailing my findings, and hopefully announce what I plan to specifically address for my PhD.  Thus, over the next few weeks I’ll talk to my friends at the Storm Prediction Center and seek the source of some of their frustrations regarding these cool-season events, read National Weather Service Service Assessment reports on known events, and read a lot of journal articles.

I can’t wait to begin…