• After witnessing the continued decrease of involvement in the SpotterNetwork staff in serving SN members with troubleshooting issues recently, I have unilaterally decided to terminate the relationship between SpotterNetwork's support and Stormtrack. I have witnessed multiple users unable to receive support weeks after initiating help threads on the forum. I find this lack of response from SpotterNetwork officials disappointing and a failure to hold up their end of the agreement that was made years ago, before I took over management of this site. In my opinion, having Stormtrack users sit and wait for so long to receive help on SpotterNetwork issues on the Stormtrack forums reflects poorly not only on SpotterNetwork, but on Stormtrack and (by association) me as well. Since the issue has not been satisfactorily addressed, I no longer wish for the Stormtrack forum to be associated with SpotterNetwork.

    I apologize to those who continue to have issues with the service and continue to see their issues left unaddressed. Please understand that the connection between ST and SN was put in place long before I had any say over it. But now that I am the "captain of this ship," it is within my right (nay, duty) to make adjustments as I see necessary. Ending this relationship is such an adjustment.

    For those who continue to need help, I recommend navigating a web browswer to SpotterNetwork's About page, and seeking the individuals listed on that page for all further inquiries about SpotterNetwork.

    From this moment forward, the SpotterNetwork sub-forum has been hidden/deleted and there will be no assurance that any SpotterNetwork issues brought up in any of Stormtrack's other sub-forums will be addressed. Do not rely on Stormtrack for help with SpotterNetwork issues.

    Sincerely, Jeff D.

Experimental Upper Air Data (cont.)

Joined
Jun 19, 2005
Messages
884
Location
New Mexico
So wxvelocity.com was short lived. I decided to take it down, and now have a blog only, http://nmstormchase.blogspot.com/, which no longer has the maps. This was mainly because with my budget I needed to move to some thing that didn’t cost me $$$. At wxvelocity.com I used to offer an “experimental” way of retrieving upper air wind velocities (speed and direction) at 9000 m & 12000 m. Instead, I will be offering this service via email.

To remind you of what I was doing… I developed a program that attempted to use locations where Doppler radars overlapped in coverage to extract the wind velocities. I’m still working out all the bugs. That is, the velocities don’t always match what you might expect. This might occur for several reasons.

1. The velocities are largely extracted from convective regions, perhaps not representative of the overall flow.
2. With the setup I had to assume the vertical velocities are minimal, perhaps not the case.
3. Various other laundry list of reasons…

Why do I think it works to some degree and does not just make noise?

While there are the few errant vectors. Overall, the vectors do seem “regionally” consistent amongst each other.

So you’re probably asking why go about all this trouble for upper level winds? While yes lower level wind shear may be a better indicator for tornadoes; I generally like to think that a single observation is worth more than a thousand model runs. Thus, this method potentially offers a glimpse at the upper level winds where soundings do not usually occur (like half way between Denver & Goodland or between Albuquerque & Alamogordo).

Either way just take it with a grain of salt. I was largely playing around over the end of summer and decided to make this.

If you would like to receive these maps PM me, or reply here and I will add you. I will be starting it up around February-March time frame. Will be bring it down in the Julyish timeframe. Since again I’m not making anything from this, the maps will again be subject to delay, modification, etc. at anytime (like I need to use my computer for a simulation).

If you do wish to receive these emails, please provide an email address where you won’t mind receiving several emails per day from me. The program is presently setup to send 6 updates per day.

Example of what the program produced in July...
120002f.jpg
 
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