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NCEP Service Center Evaluations SPC Steve Weiss
Reasons for supporting the upgrade to explicit WRF-NMM and WRF-ARW runs include:
- Improved guidance on timing and location of convective initiation during potential severe weather episodes
- Improved guidance on hourly evolution of mesoscale convective structures, including coverage, movement, and orientation of convective features
- Unique information about convective mode or morphology, specifically related to mesoscale and near-stormscale structures of lines, discrete cells, and multicellular clusters, and the temporal/spatial evolution of convective mode
- Unique information about higher order convective structures such as bow echoes and supercells, which produce a higher proportion of significant severe weather
Although there remain important challenges in high resolution NWP (pbl, convective processes and initialization), our experience suggests that the current explicit versions of the WRF-NMM and WRF-ARW are sufficiently developed and tested to be run operationally in the HRW.