The Challenge of Convective Forecasting
July 10 - 21, 2006
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Boulder, Colorado
"Predictability does not necessarily imply ability to predict"
Primary Organizers: Morris Weisman (NCAR), Lance Bosart (SUNY Albany)
Convection represents one of the fundamental modes of instability in the atmosphere, creating significant, often damaging weather phenomena on a daily basis worldwide. Short-term, explicit forecasting of convection over a multi-day period represents a real, new opportunity, as recent results from high-resolution forecast models suggest.
The goal of the colloquium will be to summarize the recent advances we have made in our understanding and prediction of convective weather with NWP models, and to describe the scientific and technological challenges and opportunities available to future researchers. Topics will include the phenomenology of mid-latitude convection and convective systems, issues of convective initiation, the parameterization of microphysical, turbulent, and boundary layer processes, convective predictability, and techniques of data assimilation and high-resolution ensemble forecasting. Emphasis will be on the 0-36 h forecast challenge.
The colloquium will be built around a basic set of lectures by a small group of core instructors, with daily lab exercises based on case studies and real-time convective forecasting with the WRF-ARW model.
Guest lecturers: Rich Rotunno, Bjorn Stevens, Chris Davis, Chris Snyder, Axel Seifert, George Bryan, David Dowell, Jack Kain, Howard Bluestein and others.
