SPC Outlook Changes in 2026

[JamesCaruso]

Hadn’t heard about this until I just happened to see this video pop up for me in YouTube

 

[James K]

Yep. saw the info on that a week or so ago.

 

[William Monfredo]

On a positive note, a three-tiered hatching for tornado intensity represents a natural progression in the forecasting processes over the years. On the other hand, it might also convey a level of authenticity, capability & accuracy that simply doesn’t exist at this time.
Rather, it provides a goal for them to continue to strive for, and certainly a good one at that, IMO.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Watching the video and hearing the rationale for the change, it makes sense, yet at the same time I wonder if it’s not a bit over-engineered and adding too much complexity. And it’s false precision, as William said.

 

[Andy Wehrle]

On a positive note, a three-tiered hatching for tornado intensity represents a natural progression in the forecasting processes over the years. On the other hand, it might also convey a level of authenticity, capability & accuracy that simply doesn’t exist at this time.
Rather, it provides a goal for them to continue to strive for, and certainly a good one at that, IMO.

Watching the video and hearing the rationale for the change, it makes sense, yet at the same time I wonder if it’s not a bit over-engineered and adding too much complexity. And it’s false precision, as William said.

They did acknowledge that very concern in the video and said (with examples) they were able to hit or exceed their target verification percentages for tornadoes most of the time. It seems wind is the most difficult to forecast with precision (which I've observed just anecdotally from how the rare, truly extreme, destructive derechos have *not* coincided with the equally rare times the wind-driven high risk has been issued).

For hail, they won't be using the third (CIG3) level because, they stated, hail exceeding a certain size (off the top of my head, 5") is so rare that the public messaging value of differentiating it from 4-5" hail would be extremely limited.

 

[Brett Roberts]

Watching the video and hearing the rationale for the change, it makes sense, yet at the same time I wonder if it’s not a bit over-engineered and adding too much complexity. And it’s false precision, as William said.

I think you have to view SPC outlooks as having numerous important downstream applications, only one of which is direct-to-public communication. As Evan alludes to in the video, the direct-to-public application was never intended to be the primary one, even though social media has changed that in practice some over the most recent decade or so.

The greater precision of these new outlooks will be particularly useful for quantitative and/or automated downstream applications. For example, emergency manager networks, insurers, etc. should be able to model a realistic range of potential impacts (say, dollar losses or injures for an event tomorrow) more effectively with this fine-grain intensity information for each hazard.

The weenie and storm chaser in me tends to agree that this precision will have some downsides when consumed directly by humans: potential confusion for the general public, and probably a lot of additional pointless quibbling/debate by armchair experts and chasers who already engage in enough of it with the existing outlook format.

But ultimately, if SPC forecasters have proven over a years-long internal trial period that their forecasts for CIG1 vs. 2 vs. 3 verify as meaningfully different intensity distributions, it would be irresponsible not to go forward with it IMO. We as taxpayers pay world-class experts to sit down and spend hours analyzing an upcoming severe weather setup, culminating in some kind of deliverable. The goal should be for that deliverable to capture and convey as much of their expert judgment as can be scientifically justified. Any scientifically justifiable perceptions they have of an event while analyzing guidance (i.e., "the cap probably won't break S of I-40, but if it does, there could easily be a sig tor") that cannot be represented in the probability fields of the current outlook format is an inefficiency in the broader system that we should be happy to remedy.