Blend Team Receives Award at National Weather Association Annual Meeting

Oct 06, 2020

The National Weather Association’s (NWA) Annual Meeting was held remotely this year, in lieu of the originally-planned gathering in Tulsa, OK, with a number of MDL staff members in “virtual attendance.”  The meeting took place during the third week of September (13th-17th).  Scientists from the MDL Statistical Modeling and Decision Support Divisions presented to the attendees on topics related to the Localized Aviation MOS Program (LAMP), the National Blend of Models (NBM), and the FACETS (Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats) severe weather watch and warning framework.

LAMP-related poster presentations were given by Judy Ghirardelli that covered recent updates to the system and new products to become operational soon, and Allison Bogusz on gridding of LAMP ceiling height and visibility forecasts over Alaska.  Adam Schnapp spoke about LAMP-driven improvements to the NBM ceiling height and visibility guidance over the CONUS which are coming in Blend v4.0.  Also in the Blend realm, Jeff Craven presented a poster on the characteristics and performance of NBM probabilistic and uncertainty information.  Finally, Greg Stumpf spoke about new developments with FACETS, including the use of Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) and new Threats-In-Motion (TIM) automated, real-time updates to warning polygons.

In what certainly was a Lab highlight during the week’s proceedings, the MDL Blend team received the NWA Operational Achievement Group Award, which is presented to a group of two or more individuals who have made a significant contribution to operational meteorology.  Michael Hudson, Acting Deputy Director of the NWS Central Region, presented the award at the NWA Awards Ceremony, held during the first evening of the Annual Meeting (Monday).  Dave Rudack was on hand to accept on behalf of the entire NBM effort which, in addition to the work of MDL SMD staff, includes collaboration with and contributions from scientists in NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research (OAR). 

​​​The presentation to the NBM team and Dave’s remarks appear at 3:27-4:51 in the video below, which also can be accessed directly on YouTube at:  https://youtu.be/DUfRUaL6PMw.  In an interesting aside, MDL folks in attendance could not fail to notice that an image of Dave (sans chyron) was also used as the “freeze frame” thumbnail for the awards ceremony session on the Annual Meeting Factor 110 “Whova” app page highlighting the first day’s events (shown immediately below on an attendee screenshot).  So, it actually could be said that Dave and the NBM team were provided with a bit more than the proverbial “15 minutes” of fame!​​​

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​An additional link to the Virtual Awards Ceremony, as well as information about all of this year’s NWA award winners can be found at: https://nwas.org/annual-meeting-events/awards-winners/.