Showers and Thunderstorms in the Southwest and Ohio Valley; Mountain Snow in the Northeast

Showers and thunderstorms, along with high-elevation snow, will begin to develop over parts of the Southwest late tonight and is expected to continue through Wednesday morning. Mountain snow over parts the Northeast will continue through Tuesday. A few strong to severe storms and heavy rainfall are possible across portions of the Lower Ohio Valley Tuesday. Read More >

The NWS uses a computer operating system called AWIPS2, and a suite of programs (including D2D, GFE and AVNFPS) to analyze weather data and ultimately create a forecast.

D2D gives us the capability to load and analyze many different types of data sets, including numerical weather models, satellite data, observations, and radar data. This allows us to gather an understanding of what is going on in the atmosphere, and predict the weather to come. Forecasters will spend a majority of their day interrogating this data as they piece together and/or update their forecasts.

The physical "forecast" is created using the GFE program, which stands for Graphical Forecasting Editor. Here we "paint a picture" of the weather across eastern Kentucky. We will update between 10 and 20 different variables (depending on the time of year...winter vs. summer), including hourly temperatures, weather type and location, winds and wind gusts, amount of precipitation, cloud cover, etc. Once our forecast is complete, we will send all of our data to the web as well as to a central computer server. This program will also let us generate a text version of the forecast, which after some careful QC'ing, is sent to the weather radio and other entities.

Day 2: Weather Observations

Day 1: Introduction

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Showers and Thunderstorms in the Southwest and Ohio Valley; Mountain Snow in the Northeast

A Day In The Life Of A NWS Meteorologist: Analyzing Weather Data (Day 3 of 14)