A message from our President:

Annual Meeting Abstract Ideas?

Paul Schlatter, 2019 NWA President

You still have time…the deadline to submit an abstract for the NWA Annual Meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, is March 7. Recall from the February newsletter that the Annual Meeting Steering Committee, which leads the process to accept talks and posters and assign them to sessions, is looking for abstracts that are interactive, jointly presented, and tie into this year's theme of “Pay it Forward.” You also have the option to recommend a session or special event. Whatever you do, make plans to attend and finish that abstract you keep putting off for tomorrow. There are only a few tomorrows left!

I want to make another plug for the Mentor/Mentee Special Session at the upcoming Annual Meeting. If you ever wanted to pay it forward for someone who was instrumental in your career, this is a fantastic way to do it. We are looking for mentor/mentee pairs to be a part of a panel discussion moderated by yours truly. My goal is to get a discussion going that highlights how you met your mentor, what makes the relationship special, and how it’s mutually beneficial. I truly believe everyone in attendance will benefit from hearing about mentorship from both sides of the coin. Submitting an application is easy: just answer a few simple questions about you and your mentor. The best part is that there is no fee for it, so what do you have to lose? To submit an application, go to the call for abstracts page on the NWA Annual Meeting page and click on the button for “Mentor and Mentee Session Form.”

For the remainder of this month’s message, I wanted to share a story from the forecast desk. I was working an evening shift that started at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 16. I mention the start time because I used the first and probably most important tool in any forecaster’s toolbox: a visual inspection of the atmosphere! Before looking outside to the west, I had briefed myself on the weather message of the day via the morning Area Forecast Discussion issued by my office (NWS Boulder). Extremely cold air aloft was being advected over the foothills west of Denver and forecast to be over the plains during the afternoon (forecast to be -30 C at 500 mb, and -17 C at 700 mb). At the surface, temperatures had warmed to 40 F by midday with the strong mid-February sun. While numerical models indicated the potential for convective snow showers, they were unable to predict the intensity, timing, and evolution of the activity we saw that day. This is not unusual for model forecasts of this type. In events like this, we take what we can get from numerical weather prediction, but most of the time using observational data is the only way to understand what the atmosphere is about to do.

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