October 2022 President’s Message

President Kathy Sherman-Morris

Now that a little time has passed since the annual meeting, I thought it might be fun to revisit some of the content. Fortunately, meeting attendees have access to the content on Whova for 6 months after the meeting. If you registered for the meeting, the presentations will be available in Whova through early February, and the options to interact with other attendees will also be available through early February.

I recently went back to review some of the showcase presentations I missed. I thought I’d share some of the insights I gained and some of the presentations I found interesting.

A number of the showcases talked about how to integrate new or different products or technologies to help with existing problems. One of these was Integrating ArcGIS Online and SKYWARN: Creating a More Robust Locally Trained Spotter Network by Jeremy Buckles (NWS Morristown, TN). Their office experienced a lack of spotter training during the pandemic. According to the showcase presentation, their training also suffered from a lack of locally relevant examples. To address some of these issues, they added ArcGIS story maps to their trainings. You can see their story maps at this website.

Applications of Advected Layered Precipitable Water for Winter Storms by Sheldon Kusselson (CIRA) and co-authors was another showcase that described the use of a new product. I have to admit that I was drawn to this presentation by all the pretty images on the title slide. However, I found the images in the presentation useful examples of how the Advected Layered Precipitable Water product, which will become operational in 2023, can be used in various winter precipitation events. They also provided a link to the current 12-hour loop of the ALPW.

Another showcase I enjoyed was GOES Split-window Precipitable Water (SPW) to anticipate severe convection on 3 May 2021 in Texas by Jon Zeitler (NWS Austin-San Antonio) and co-authors. Zeitler et al. provided a case study from the 3 May 2021 severe weather event in central Texas and showed how the Split-window Precipitable Water (SPW) product can be used to help fill in the gaps that exist due to lack of upper-air observations. I thought the presentation was very effective at using animations to show the location of convection and why it favored one area over another.

Chelsea Peters (NWS Sacramento), in Heat Risk Doesn’t Solve Everything, provided useful insight about how her office identified what their key partners were interested in or had concerns about regarding heat risk. Following this, they came up with a heat risk playbook that helped to answer these concerns or questions. In the playbook, they included items such as definitions, thresholds, or policy recommendations. One thing I don’t think I would have thought to include that I learned their partners wanted was a list of statistics, such as the number of deaths and annual number of warnings issued.

For a more social-science-y focused presentation, I recommend Tornado Radar Images and Path Directions: Assessing Public Knowledge by Jason Senkbeil (University of Alabama) and myself. I admit I am a little biased about the last showcase presentation because I am a co-author and was very much involved in the project.  An interesting result I think members can take away from this presentation is how our sample thought the higher reflectivity portion of the radar image was the more dangerous part of the storm rather than the area ahead of the hook echo.

There are many more great showcase presentations and recorded oral presentations on Whova. Check them out while you can! And lastly, if you weren’t able to attend the annual meeting this year, I hope you will start planning now to attend the 2023 meeting in Kansas City September 9-13.

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