In this video we're gonna get some practice with WarnGen. 

So let's go ahead under our Scales menu we'll select wfo. Under the frames count, we'll go to a 12 frame loop. And before we load our radar product, let's go ahead under Cave, since we're on WES 2 Bridge, we need to launch the new text workstation. This way when the warnings pop up, we will be able to see the text. I'm going to put that off the screen for now. 

Now we have two radars to choose from. We can look at KCRI or Frederick. Frederick's a little closer so why don't we go ahead and load a 0.5 Z/SRM8. And under maps we will load cities. And let's hit the enter key on the keypad and then right click on cities and then let's hold down and change the color to yellow. Alright lets hit the enter key again so and enter key one more time so we can see our product legends. 

Alright let's go ahead and zoom in to our storm in southwest Oklahoma. And we'll hit the dot key on the keypad to toggle over to reflectivity. See our radar over there the Frederick radar. Let's go ahead and step through this sequence. We can see where the storm is moving and we're going to track the storm with Warngen and make a polygon. 

So next let's click on the Warngen button. And then we will take the Drag Me to Storm and we're going to put it on the leading edge of the threat for this storm. So we had interrogated the storm earlier, the integrated radar sampling. We found that there was correlation coefficient minimums right in here on this high reflectivity band. That suggested this is primarily a hail threat. So we want to put the dot on the leading edge of that threat. And then we're going to track the storm. Now it's really important to use those distance speed techniques we talked about earlier in the course, where we're going to step back four frames. One, two, three, four.  And then we're going to move the dot to the same storm relative location and then step forward: one, two, three, four just to see does that track look good. I'd say that's a decent looking track. So once we have our our track down it's important not to step a frame, move the dot, step a frame and move a dot. Your motions are going to be kind of going everywhere. You need to go to the last frame first. Then move your dot and then we step back four frames and move the dot once. That'll give you a nice stable motion estimate. And then make sure it tracks along with your feature. Next we are going to click on the track button to update the track with the motion that we just did. 

After that it's time to look at our threat areas. Let's go ahead and zoom in a little bit more and I'm gonna move my Warngen window out of the way for a second. This is gonna be a hail based warning and I'm gonna suggest we just go ahead and start with a two inch hail for the hail size in the warning. But let's go ahead and look at the area of the warning here. Hulan should be out of the warning. I think most of the correlation coefficients were just up to this reflectivity gradient. So I'm just gonna make sure that a couple of my cities are Hulan should be out of the warning. 

We've got some area here on the backside that's... that's not really covered with threat. But it's really hard to say for sure where that there's the correlation coefficient minimum we're going right back into this waek reflectivity, so i don't want to get too... too specific on the backside of this threat because there could be some large individual... large hailstones falling out the backside... of this. Now, the ZDR column was over here on the north side of the echo so I am going to increase this a little bit because i think that there, you know, there could be a chance that this part of the storm could intensify the main updraft being kind of more on the northern side of the storm.  So, the key with the polygon is that we want to see what cities are in the path.  The main threat is probably Central High and Marlow... Rush Springs might be a bit north... Acme, it's it's hard to say, they're right on the border.  But i'll leave them in for now. Just check to see, am I clipping any counties... you know, the next county downstream is not getting clipped. So I think this looks Like a reasonable polygon. If the storm were to right turn then you know it might move out of the polygon a little bit here, so you Know I might bring this down just a little bit to have a little bit more Uncertainty on the right flank in case it does right turn, because This environment is very favorable for severe weather intensification.

All right so that's a decent first guess for our polygon. And we're gonna go in here and we're going to configure our polygon, so we're gonna check the severe thunderstorm checkbox. That's what we had when we first kind of fired this up. If you didn't have it selected and you had something else selected, then you have to kind of go through those steps again to redo your polygon. So, you could pause the video and do that if you didn't have this set to a severe thunderstorm last time you used it.

Under the time range we're gonna choose 45 minutes for the warning, because the storms have been alive for a while and that's a decent place to start. The basis for the warning we're just going to go with "radar indicated" just to start out with. And any time I have baseball or larger hail, or even severe hail, and I'm in an environment that favors wind, then I'm gonna go ahead and, if I've got severe hail, I'm probably gonna include 60 mile an hour winds just because a lot of times strong updrafts that produced large hail can easily produce 60 mile an hour winds.  And there's not much in the base velocity at this point, but if it were a very unfavorable environment for... say a saturated environment, then I would... I would maybe leave the wind threat out. But, in this kind of situation I'd go ahead and leave it in.

I said earlier we're gonna go with a two inch hail. It's going to be our radar estimate. And then, let's go down here to... we've got two options. There's "select for pathcast" and "select for a list of cities." For our WDTD courses, like the Radar and Applications Course, we advise not to use pathcast. It's the default in AWIPS, but that tells you exactly when will it arrive in certain cities. And if your cities are small and behave like points, then that can be unambiguous, and you can kind of use that if you're very careful with how those times are... how you're tracking your threat and what those times mean.  But if you have a very large area, that... that a specific point value relative to a city is is not going to be as meaningful, then it takes a lot more time to get used to it. So we're gonna keep it simple and just do "Select for a list of cities."

Our call to action don't really matter too much With this, but since we're... we'll probably... we don't want to flood our warning with calls to action, but we do want to be specific if we have a particular threat. Like, in this instance, it's primarily just large hail. So I'll go ahead and choose... this is large destructive hail. If I'm going with a two inch hail, it's pretty significant. I've got one of the elevated tags instead of the base tags.  And then we don't have any particular calls to action that are pertinent to this situation, so one call to action is fine.

Next, we'll click on the create text button.  And that's going to generate the product. Up comes the AWIPS header block. We don't need to modify the header block so we'll just hit the Enter button to enter our text of our Warning. Now our version of the AWIPS Fundamentals course and the Radar and Applications Course this year is rolling out just as the mixed case is being implemented in WarnGen, so for... for severe thunderstorm warnings and other warnings like that.  So, we're gonna go ahead and include the syntax for using the mixed case in our... in our warning here, since that's what everybody will be using in early 2017, when you're off applying this knowledge in operations.

So we're gonna read our warning. There's a couple blocks up here.  We've got our... our ETN is listed in the header block. In WES-2 Bridge this is set to be in the 5,000's, they're doing something new in WES-2 Brige to separate it from our ETNs, our event tracking numbers, for our operational warnings. So you can See this is a severe thunderstorm warning, there's our ETN, that's how we're gonna track this unique warning. It's going to be 5010. I have the times listed here. All the blue text in here is locked so we can't edit that information. So we have the counties that are consistent with the polygon we've drawn, and then we've got some text in here... severe thunderstorms located nine mile south of Sterling moving northeast at 30 miles per hour. Two inch hail and sixty mile per hour winds are what's our main warning . The Hazards... if we scroll down to the bottom, then we see that the... hail two inches and wind 60 miles an hour, that's in our... that's what we had told WarnGen to use, and it's locked so we don't want to go in here and change the numbers or anything to have it be inconsistent with the locked text at the bottom. 

So primarily we just want to read the warning, make sure it makes sense, look for the cities in the path to make sure that... Central High and Marlowe were the two most important cities that are in the direct path of this, and I see Duncan's in there, Marlowe, Fort Sill, Central High's in the list of cities. So I Just want to make sure that the cities that are in the immediate path are going to be included in the warning.  So after we're done we can just click the send button. And even though this live active product box pops up, if you're on your WES-2 Bridge there is no way this is connected to your real-time system. They only have the disc mounted with no read... with only read access, you can't write to it, and then there's no communications whatsoever with the live... the live communications distribution. So we can go ahead and, on WES-2 Bridge, click Go Ahead and the warning will not go out. And we just go ahead and click it again. Now on WES-2 Bridge, this message pops Up that it'll expire soon. They're still working on fixing that. But in your live operations that alert Will come up when it's about ready to expire.

All right, so let's go ahead and under the obs menu, under the local convective warnings, let's go ahead and click that. Now I've got a lot of polygons in here from my earlier tests, so I'm gonna go ahead and... I can toggle that off. Just so we can kind of see did our... did our warning go through. So i'm gonna left click on the interactive WarnGen. We can see it's... this one right here is my... is my Polygon. So don't worry about all the other Polygons right now. When we're in case review it's kind of accumulating all our practices, so we just wanted to show you that when... when you are issuing your warning you can go look at the obs menu and you can see the polygons to make sure that everything was distributed in the simulation here, or at least in the case review, so that you can kind of see the result of your Warning.

All right, we'll notice that When we did create our warning it did kind of clip one of these counties. It didn't extend far enough over this county to... to trigger the aerial coverage for inclusion, so it went ahead and kind of trimmed that out. Otherwise the polygon looks good and... and that's just how we issue our... our first warning.

In the next step we are going to practice using a follow-Up statement for this warning that... for the severe thunderstorm warning that we just issued.