Severe HAil Verification Experiment (SHAVE 2006)

Operations Plan

Introduction

Facilities

Data Collection Team Duties

Daily Activities

Data Collection Strategies

Survey Information

Staff Logistics (internal)

Data

SHAVE Facilities

SHAVE is being conducted in NOAA's Hazardous Weather Testbed (Norman) as part of the Experimental Warning Program. The project will commence at the Storm Prediction Center's (SPC) Science Support Area (SSA) in May. A few "down days" are expected in mid-to-late-June as computing facilities are moved to the new National Weather Center building at the University of Oklahoma in the SWAT development laboratory.

Computing Cluster

SHAVE utilizes data from the NSSL/SPC CONUS WDSSII system, which ingests data from most WSR-88D radars in the United States and builds a three-dimensional shapshot of the radar reflectivity over the CONtinental US. The data update once every five minutes with a grid resolution of 1 km by 1km (horizonal) by 1 km (vertical). Several products, such as Maximum Expected Size of Hail (MESH) may be derived from the 3D reflectivity and other data fields. Additional details of the CONUS WDSSII system may be found in Lakshmanan et al 2006.

Display Machines

The laboratory contains six computers with adequate display, processing, and memory capabilities to run the WDSSII display (wg), Google Earth, Mozilla Firefox, and ArcGIS. These machines connect to the computing cluster to retreive data, and may also submit collected data back to the cluster for processing. Each participant will utilize one of these machines during data collection.

Collaboration Display

The collaboration display is a 42" plasma screen monitor that shows details on (a) the current storm's reflecticity and hail swath profile, (b) the cross-section of the hail swath currently being examined, and (c) lists of telephone numbers being called. As the name implies, it facilitates collaboration among participants who may be on and off the telephone at different times.

Telephone Lines

The SPC SSA contains one digital line and four analog lines, for a total of five lines. Headseats are available for all telephones. The SWAT Development Lab contains six digital telephones for the duration of this project.

Geographic Information

The geographic information utilized in this project comes from a number of sources. Google Earth provides information on business locations and phone numbers, which is especially useful for collecting information over densly populated areas. Information on farmsteads and rural homes is available in county directories that are available from several different companies. Other data sources, such as local government web sites and GIS tools, may also be accessed as supplimental information.