So many moderate risks???

[Dave Kaplow]

I could be wrong but it seems to me that the SPC does a much better job forecasting events that are “close to home†i.e. systems that play out over the Southern Plains. The SPC’s batting average is very high for good old-fashioned tornado alley outbreaks. Move the focus to, say, the Northeast, and things get much more dicey. Of course from a severe forecasting standpoint the Southern Plains are extremely data-rich, with mesonets and profilers and ultra-fine gridded models that aren’t available for the rest of the country. But I tend to think that there’s also a certain familiarity factor at work... The Plains area gets the lion’s share of the nation’s severe weather, it’s only natural that the SPC forecasters would do better when the scenario is one they’ve seen a hundred times before. I tend to give SPC outlooks less weight the further out they are from Norman.

As for who is the ‘best’ forecaster, I’d say there probably are a few chasers who are slightly better than anyone at the SPC when it comes to predicting precisely where the most prolific tornadic storms are likely to fire on a given day. But take the word tornadic out of that statement and it probably ceases to be true. The SPC simply doesn’t have the manpower to do the kind of small-scale scrutinizing that the best chasers excel at, not when its job is to evaluate the total severe threat, including non-tornadic hazards, for the entire country. Chasers are specialists compared to the SPC, and as such they just might do a bit better at a few very specific tasks. One thing I wonder about: do SPC forecasters play hunches the way chasers tend to? Or do they refrain from making predictions when the only real grounds for doing so is a ‘gut feeling’? It seems to me that a veteran chaser working off his intuition and the ‘feel’ of the sky might well succeed where a scientist working mainly from a model will fail.

 

[Joe Nield]

One thing I've learned as a meteorologist is that I rarely, if ever, criticize another forecaster, especially if evidence supports their forecast as having been scientifically sound. The forecast process is just so complex, and so many things come into play that it is nearly impossible to fully understand what thoughts and, yes, intuition, went into that forecast.

 

[Morgan Palmer]

I too have noticed a bit of overdoing it, mainly with a few watches so far this year. Esp. a recent tornado watch for East Texas after we were socked in with clouds. However, there are good forecasts and bad forecasts, and I would never want to criticise the SPC because they are on target so often. It has been something the other weather guys at work and I have discussed in the past few weeks.

They did get last night's svr right on. Plus, almost magically, a marginally severe cell traveling south of I-20 seemed to grow to a monster hailer (Doppler algorithm indicated) as soon as it crossed the MDT boundary.