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Severe Weather 3/15 - 3/16

ColdFront said:
It kind of got buried, but I made a similar point. The SPC seem to be a bit more bullish with the new outlooks. Most likely just calibrating this new approach with actual outlooks/events now.
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It's only early days, but i just don't know. I don't think every event deserves a sig risk. For wind and hail, it's more difficult to determine whether sig hazards occur with those and i think CIG is very useful for those hazards because we don't understand them fully! We don't know it all about tornadoes but with this system, there's gonna be a high false alarm ratio and high verification rate. It's a good concept but the overuse of it is really putting it in a poor position. Hopefully, there's a cutdown on the usage of it. Having to message every week "a conditional window for significant tornadoes does exist here", and the majority of the time, the conditional risk fails, the public will not take the conditionality of the event into play and just slam the SPC. Slamming the SPC is poor criticism but fairly critiquing with good points that makes sense is alright to me.
 
WeathermanLeprechaun said:
It's only early days, but i just don't know. I don't think every event deserves a sig risk. For wind and hail, it's more difficult to determine whether sig hazards occur with those and i think CIG is very useful for those hazards because we don't understand them fully! We don't know it all about tornadoes but with this system, there's gonna be a high false alarm ratio and high verification rate. It's a good concept but the overuse of it is really putting it in a poor position. Hopefully, there's a cutdown on the usage of it. Having to message every week "a conditional window for significant tornadoes does exist here", and the majority of the time, the conditional risk fails, the public will not take the conditionality of the event into play and just slam the SPC. Slamming the SPC is poor criticism but fairly critiquing with good points that makes sense is alright to me.
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Yeah. It seems like the way they are applied now the CIG1 is going to be fairly common. It'd almost be rarer to, for example, get a tornado setup with 5% or greater coverage probability where you can be confident enough that all of them will be weaker than EF2 to *NOT* use it.

I'm still getting out of the old school mentality where the presence of the hatched area at all means something fairly substantial about the potential ceiling of the event. I have to remember now that CIG1 doesn't mean the same thing, even though it looks the same on the map.
 
I think they are still trying to work through all the in-practice applications of the new CIG system and it just happened that there were back-to-back potential higher end threats in the days after it was implemented that kind of exposed some of the issues with it. I like the structure of it, there are definitely areas for improvement, and I think seeing both verification (the northern Indiana storms) and a "false alarm" of sorts (Mid-Atlantic today) will ultimately help the SPC refine it for the future.
 
There will always be bugs, kinks, and other assorted issues that would need to be ironed out of a new operational system. Even doing a lot of experimental testing beforehand won’t always find everything.

For example: IIRC (and please correct me if I get anything wrong), back when Doppler weather radar was being experimented with, the data collected with the experimental units suggested that, among other things, around half of all supercellular mesocyclones produced tornadoes. However, data collected after operational use began in the 1990s showed that the ratio was probably closer to one quarter or thereabouts (at least partially due to environmental factors varying much more widely across the areas the operational radars were installed in than in the areas the experimental radars were installed in).

I’d imagine that there’s still at least some jank lingering with the new CIG system, though I’m willing to bet that more future experience would help in getting a better grasp on reasonably accurate use.
 
ColdFront said:
It’s why a stout EML and the right balance of dry/moist air is so essential for upper echelon outbreaks. Also doesn’t hurt to have a fast moving morning round (4/27/11 and 4/3/74 both featured this) that leaves subsidence in its wake. Just to further make a developing warm sector even more hostile to junkvection while instability builds.

Timing, storm mode, and crapvection can really take out a setup.
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Convective crowding seems to be a very powerful limiting force in higher-end setups, particularly when it comes to strong tornado potential. Even when nearly all other parameters are present, overcrowding can occur even when it's not inherently obvious as a fail mode, though for this setup in particular it became pretty clear that it could be a problem for today as of last night.
bckhd2 said:
I think they are still trying to work through all the in-practice applications of the new CIG system and it just happened that there were back-to-back potential higher end threats in the days after it was implemented that kind of exposed some of the issues with it. I like the structure of it, there are definitely areas for improvement, and I think seeing both verification (the northern Indiana storms) and a "false alarm" of sorts (Mid-Atlantic today) will ultimately help the SPC refine it for the future.
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Agree on this - you have to test your system and I expect to see them adapt to using it. It'll also be important to keep in mind going forward that percentage contours will be handled differently now, so trying to purely compare SPC outlooks now to analogs from before must be done with caution and context. For example, I saw some people pointing out the 60% wind contour being super rare, which is true, but I expect we will see that much more often going forward, and personally, I'm perfectly okay with that.
 
Yeah I think the higher percentage risks will definitely increase because now they have a way to address coverage and intensity separately rather than having to message both in one risk level. It'll allow them more room with high coverage relatively low intensity events (i.e. QLCS driven days) versus low coverage high intensity events (more supercellular modes).
 
Clancy said:
Convective crowding seems to be a very powerful limiting force in higher-end setups, particularly when it comes to strong tornado potential. Even when nearly all other parameters are present, overcrowding can occur even when it's not inherently obvious as a fail mode, though for this setup in particular it became pretty clear that it could be a problem for today as of last night.
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Flip side is, sometimes it occurs but doesn't end up limiting the ceiling of the event. Based on the HRRR output for 4/26/24, I was skeptical that the northern part of the arc of warm sector storms would be able to do too much given how many were being portrayed so close together. That did indeed occur, but they ended up being prolific significant tornado producers for quite some time. I'm learning you really have to pay attention to the wind profiles to see their impact on storm mode, just having 0-3KM directional shear with high SRH values isn't enough.
 
ColdFront said:
It kind of got buried, but I made a similar point. The SPC seem to be a bit more bullish with the new outlooks and CIG parameters. Most likely just calibrating this new approach with actual outlooks/events now.
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It's a new approach, and with it being public, it's clear they're still ironing things out in terms of when they use it, or when they should pull back.
 
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