Tornado tracking, Windy
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Re: Tornado
When I did a search for this topic in the community forum, I found this post from 2017 on the topic without replies. I have seen several others related to shear.
During the outbreak on Easter Sunday, 2020. I was tracking the storms in Windy in addition to watching the news as it happened.
These are my observations.
- Thunderstorm prediction in combination of CAPE values gives a rough idea when storms will go by in a particular area and the possibility of them being severe. With this information in combination to the forecasts products from the Storm Prediction Center should give you enough time to prepare for severe weather. However, it does not substitute forecast and interpretation from a professional weather forecaster. The idea is for you to have a rough idea to prepare to execute your severe weather plan.
- Accurate real time tracking for a possible tornado can't be done because there is no SRM view in Windy. However what I noticed is that if you see a packed cluster of lightning within a given area of high DBZ during severe weather, the chance of tornado formation is high. This can be observed in the radar view in Windy. These clusters of lightning will move at a given path as the storm moves along. With this one can have an approximation on the impacted area. However, I would not rely on this only to track or predict a tornado. It is very important to watch newscasts during severe weather events and keep your weather radio handy at all times.
- Helicity prediction in Windy would be really helpful based on the wind data that is already provided in a way that you do not need to observe every single layer to get an idea of these. It would be an interpretation of the wind direction and speed in a consolidated fashion.
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Well...
I finally found the airgram feature. I'll get more familiar about that because it seems to provide the same information as shear and helicity.
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