An Overview of the 2010 Hazardous Weather Testbed Experimental Forecast Program Spring Experiment

The NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) conducts annual spring forecasting experiments organized by the Storm Prediction Center and National Severe Storms Laboratory to test and evaluate emerging scientific concepts and technologies for improved analysis and prediction of hazardous mesoscale weather. A primary goal is to accelerate the transfer of promising new scientific concepts and tools from research to operations through the use of intensive real-time experimental forecasting and evaluation activities conducted during the spring and early summer convective storm period. The 2010 NOAA/HWT Spring Forecasting Experiment (SE2010), conducted 17 May through 18 June, had a broad focus, with emphases on heavy rainfall and aviation weather, through collaboration with the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center (HPC) and the Aviation Weather Center (AWC), respectively. In addition, using the computing resources of the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma provided unprecedented real-time conterminous United States (CONUS) forecasts from a multimodel Storm-Scale Ensemble Forecast (SSEF) system with 4-km grid spacing and 26 members and from a 1-km grid spacing configuration of the Weather Research and Forecasting model. Several other organizations provided additional experimental high-resolution model output. This article summarizes the activities, insights, and preliminary findings from SE2010, emphasizing the use of the SSEF system and the successful collaboration with the HPC and AWC. A supplement to this article is available online (DOI:10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00040.2)