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Category: Convective Initiation

Convection Returns to the southern Plains

Spring convection and associated severe weather returned to the southern Plains on April 22nd. Did predictors of convection do a good job in locating the severe cells?CIMSS has recently started to produce synthetic satellite imagery from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model run at the National Severe Storms Laboratory... Read More

Detection of convective initiation and the first tornado in March

After an unusually quiet February tornado-wise in the United States (only one tornado was reported, an EF-0 in California that lasted for 3 minutes late in the day on February 27th), two tornadoes touched down near sunset in western Oklahoma, near the town of Hammon. The above animation from NAWIPS shows 1-km GOES-12 visible imagery with superimposed contours of cloud-top cooling (and lightning strikes) from about 2000 UTC on 9 March to 0015... Read More