Critical Fire Weather Conditions in the Plains; Heavy Snow in the Sierra and Northern Rockies

Gusty winds and warm, very dry conditions will lead to a Critical Risk of fire weather across much of the High Plains through Thursday. A Pacific storm system will bring strong winds and precipitation from the Pacific Northwest to the Northern Rockies, with heavy mountain snow in the Sierra-Nevada and northern Rockies. Heavy snow will continue in the northern Rockies on Thursday. 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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Critical Fire Weather Conditions in the Plains; Heavy Snow in the Sierra and Northern Rockies

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