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 2006

The Severe Hail Verification Experiment (SHAVE) is a unique project that blends high-resolution radar data with geographic information. The primary objective of this experiment is to collect high temporal and spatial resolution data that describe the distribution of hail sizes in hail swaths produced by severe thunderstorms. These data will enable several goals, including:

  1. to utilize the high-resolution verification data in the development of techniques for probabilistic warnings of severe thunderstorms,
  2. to evaluate the performance of a multi-sensor, multi-radar hail detection algorithm,
  3. to correlate changes in the hail size distribution with storm evolution, and
  4. to enhance climatological information about hail in the United States.

Photo taken May 11, 1982 by NSSL storm intercept team in the hail core of a supercell thunderstorm that later produced an F2 tornado.

The high spatial and temporal resolution of the dataset collected during the project will facilitate the development of decision-making tools that improve forecasts and warnings of severe hail as well as improving the historical record of hail events. The project runs approximately May 15, 2006 through August 15, 2006. It utilizes the real-time hail swath products from the CONUS WDSSII system to enhance data collection via verification telephone calls to select data points along a storm's path immediately following storm passage. Because the presence of hail is diagnosed via radar on the scale of the continental United States, it is possible to collect data from anywhere in the contiguous 48 states on a daily basis throughout the summer, which minimizes project "down days." Data are collected by a team of University of Oklahoma meteorology students working closely with scientists from the National Severe Storms Laboratory/Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies. SHAVE is an experiment being conducted in the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed as part of the Experimental Warning Program by the NSSL/CIMMS Severe Weather Warning Applications and Technology Transfer (SWAT) group.

The NSSL multi-sensor hail swath application (left) shows where the largest hail potentially fell. Utilizing a mixture of county directory maps, Google Earth Pro (right), and GIS applications enables the collection of hail size data from businesses and farmsteads across the United States using the hail swath algorithm and other tools as guidance.