A Severe-Storm-centric Guide to Haby's Hints

[Darren Addy]

A thread by a newbie in the advanced forum led me to this idea:

While I'd agree that reading all of Haby's Hints (theweatherprediction.com) is certainly good advice for anyone interested in weather, I think we would also agree that Haby's Hints was not written with severe storm forecasting as its only focus. And the sheer number of Haby Hints might be intimidating to some. It occurs to me that what might be a helpful "bridge" for people coming to weather through an interest in severe storms might simply be a Table of Contents (list of links) to the Haby Hints that concentrate on the information used most in severe storm forecasting. They would not necessarily be in the order that Haby has them (or wrote them).

This thread is for anyone to give opinions on which particular Haby Hints need to be understood first, then next, then next... (you get the picture). Fortunately, since they are hypertext, one does not have to read them in the order suggested. But I thought that with all of the severe-storm-centric forecasting interest and knowledge here that this might be a worthy idea.

Feel free to start the discussion and we'll see how it develops. You can link to particular Haby Hints or simply discuss concepts that should be well understood first (or before others). More discussion will probably follow on how we should shuffle things around before we end up with a final "Table of Contents" set of links.

This could take a little time, but with those who have forged the path sharing how they might learn it better (if they had to do it over) we might come up with a worthy little tool.

 

[Rich Thompson]

Severe storm forecasting is actually not that difficult if you stick to an ingredients-based approach. The ingredients are:

1. Moisture
2. Instability
3. Lift
4. Vertical wind shear

All of the complicating factors come from how and why to look at particular representations of each ingredient. Once you accept that you can make a forecast (or at least a diagnosis) of severe storm potential from these four ingredients, I'd suggest that you learn how to interpret a skew-T log P thermodynamic diagram. Understanding how you can use the diagram makes it easier to piece together most of the ingredients (1, 2, and 4) in one spot at one time.

Surface analysis and satellite interpretation are important because they have much greater horizontal resolution than the upper air soundings. In the end, you'll have more success using these tools when you have some vague idea *why* you're doing what you're doing.

Rich T.

 

[Rob H]

Without trying to put the kabash on this thread, is http://www.theweatherprediction.com/severe/ missing something that would otherwise make it better? Or were you thinking more along the lines of something akin to a sitemap, where you could get a feel for the structure of all the information linked to on that page?

To touch on Rich's ingredients-based approach, Haby has a convenient page with links to just those four topics (and that is also linked to from the URL above): http://www.theweatherprediction.com/severe/ingredients/

I personally have read the original thread in the advanced forum several times, because I still have difficulties mapping the knowledge from Haby's site to real world situations. I understand it more each time I try to guess when and where a watch/warning is issued, and I'm not sure if there's any easier way to get there other than experience.