Poor Verification from the SPC on Saturday
By Quincy Vagell on July 7, 2012, 11:53pm
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The SPC issued a Severe Thunderstorm Watch on Saturday, but only a small portion of the watch actually verified any severe weather reports.
Saturday was a bit of a false alarm when it comes to severe weather. The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) was hyping up the storm threat for areas north of NYC, including the Hudson Valley and western CT.
As discussed in previous articles, the severe weather threat was marginal at best and it's a bit puzzling as to why the SPC not only issued the watch, but then left it up until 7 p.m., even though the severe threat had pretty much been dead for a while.
The other interesting thing is that a lot of reports fell west of the original watch entirely, even though the SPC did add subsequent watches later in the afternoon.
Being on the fringe of a watch is one thing. However, if you look at the black box, pretty much only the southwest 25% (one quarter) of the box even had severe weather at all. Almost nothing happened for the remainder of the area.
To play devil's advocate just a little, one can argue that severe weather forecasting in the Northeast is very difficult. Almost everything has to go right for severe weather and a lot of times, scenarios bust. All it takes is one or two little things to throw off an entire forecast and Saturday was a prime example of that.
Based on some lessons learned today, it becomes crucial to very carefully look at the big picture and also follow short-term updates. Sometimes you have to pull the plug if things change and perhaps the SPC dropped the ball on this one.
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