The forecasting week number 3 at the ESSL Testbed is over. Similiar to the 1st week, we did not experience much severe weather and our convective outlooks were mostly related to SE domain. Let’s look at these predictions and their verification:

Our participants made a quite good job in predicting lightning activity areas and severe weather events. Thanks are also due to Thilo Kuhne who did a great job in searching reports of severe weather in the media. Below, we present various pictures of participants during their work, weather briefings and expert lecture presentations:

ESSL Testbed2015 week3 team.

Josef Haslhofer during weather briefing.

Jacques Ambuhl preparing the forecast.

Day1 forecasting activities.

Day2 forecasting activities.

Pieter Groenemeijer leading the evaluation session.

Roger Edwards from Storm Prediction Center during his expert lecture.

Martin Jonas during weather briefing.

Andres Spirihin during weather briefing.

Pieter Groenemeijer, Thomas Hengstebeck and Paul James.

Jacques Ambuhl during his weather briefing.

Our office team during their work, Thilo Kuhne and Thomas Schreiner.

Beautiful stratiform cloud structures were also the part of our evening sighteeing in Wiener-Neustadt.

On Monday we start our last week of 2015 testbed, let’s hope for good severe weather setups!

The ESSL week number three just began! In opposition to previous week, we have only male participants from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Latvia. Our special guest Roger Edwards came to us from USA (Storm Prediction Center). Also our experts responsible for nowcasting and NWP products from DWD are onboard: Thomas Hengstebeck and Paul James.

Opening session for the participants.

Good mood during the opening session did not leave the participants 😉

This week also our ESWD expert Thilo Kuhne joined us to support us in the forecasting verification.

Thilo Kuhne during his work on collecting severe weather reports.

Forecasters today prepared few forecasts for the following days, we present them below:

Weather briefings were presented by Roger Edwards and Lionel Peyraud while the expect lecture was given by Jacques Ambuhl in the ESSL research and training center.

Roger Edwards (SPC)

Lionel Peyraud (MeteoSwiss)

Jacques Ambuhl (MeteoSwiss)

… and some pictures from the forecasting activities 😉

Participants and ESSL Team during 2nd week of the ESSL Testbed2015.

Currently we are having a break from our Testbed activities, 3rd Testbed week starts on 15th June. However, it is worth to make a short summary of the previous week and participant’s forecasts. Total of 6 participants from 6 different countries took part in 5 expert lectures and within the support of the 3 ESTOFEX forecasters prepared 8 day1 and day2 forecasts, 12 nowcasts and  6 day3-5 forecasts. The most important days in the context of severe weather were Thursday, Saturday and especially Friday. Below we present the most interesting forecasts where participants managed to predict severe weather quite well! It is also worth to highlight Day4 and Day5 forecasts that relatively well pointed out areas where severe weather was likely. We start with the longest lead time forecasts:

Few of the nowcasts that were issued by our participants were very distinctive in distinguishing areas where severe weather was likely, below we present 2 best nowcasts, the second one with large hail nowcast is very impressive (6 reports)! Well done!

… and some pictures of the participants and ESSL Team during their work on Friday! 😉

Pieter working very hard on programming the ESSL Testbed nowcast display and sounding data.

Alois and Christoph working with participants on the Day3-5 forecasts.

Nowcasting activities!

Catrina, Maria and Jan working on the forecast.

Lars Tijssen and Thomas Schreiner during their ESSL work.

… and the other side of the table, Tomas Pucik and Mateusz Taszarek accompanied by Thomas 😉

Catrina presenting the Day1 forecast.

Christoph Gatzen and Tomas Pucik during the weather briefings.

Helve presenting the Day2 forecast.

Fully focused participants 😉

This day passed under very interesting discussions about weather setup that is currently going on in western Europe and expert lecture presentation given by Christoph Gatzen. In the morning Pieter Gronemeijer discussed the basis related to updraft speeds in convective cells and influance of mesocyclone on the increase in updraft stength. Then, our participants prepared convective outlooks for this day and tomorrow. Weather briefings were presented by today’s group leaders: Maria Frada and Miroslav Singer. Few pictures from this day tomorrow:

Pieter Groenemeijer discussing the importance of rotation in convective cells on the strength of the updraft.

Early morning opening session.

Day 2 forecast presented by Miroslav Singer

Day 1 forecast presented by Maria Frada

Christoph Gatzen (ESTOFEX) giving lecture on convective windstorms in Europe.

And the Day1 and Day 2forecasts:

Stay tuned! Tomorrow our participants will update forecasts for Friday and Saturday.

Nowadays we do not have good synoptic patterns that would favor occurrence of severe weather over Europe. However, our predictions expect that good overlap of instability and shear may occur in western Europe on Friday and Saturday. These forecasts are quite distant, but general setup is likely to appear. Below, some pictures from Testbed activities:

Tomas working with a participants in a “Day1 group”.

Mateusz working with a participants on a Day 3, 4, 5 forecasts.

This week Christoph Gatzen from ESTOFEX joined us as well.

And here are the forecasts for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday:

Today we expect new participants of the second week of ESSL Testbed2015 from Austria, Romania, Germany, Portugal, Slovakia, Netherlands and Czech Republic. We start our introductory session at 12 UTC. In this week participants will also work in two groups with Tomas Pucik and Mateusz Taszarek. In addition, also Christoph Gatzen from ESTOFEX will support forecasting. Before we began new week, let’s take a look at the forecasts verification from the last days of the 1st week.

On friday, one of the group managed to predict tornado that occurred in Bavaria. They included quite detailed forecast description:

“A level 1 was issued for S Germany, W Czech Republic and parts of Poland mainly for large hail, severe wind gusts and in lesser extent for tornado (especially in E Bavaria and W parts of Czech Republic).

(…) Because LLS will locally exceed 10 m/s it cannot be ruled out that some isolated tornado event is possible. We pedict that convective cells will remain isolated, which somehow increases probability for tornado.(…)”

Tornado occurred near Freystadt around 16 UTC.