A Sounding-based Severe Weather Tool to Support Daily Operations at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

The Applied Meteorology Unit (AMU) is a research to operations organization whose purpose is to improve weather support to America’s space program at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), Florida; Vandenberg Air Force Base, California; and Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia (Madura et al. 2011; Bauman et al. 2004). The AMU developed the original Severe Weather Forecast Decision Aid (Bauman et al. 2005) based on the 1000 UTC (0600 local time) CCAFS sounding (KXMR) as a first guess tool to help the forecasters determine the severe weather threat for the day at KSC, CCAFS and Patrick Air Force Base (PAFB), Florida. The original decision aid used a Hyper-Text Markup Language graphical user interface (GUI) and the period of record (POR) included the warm season months of May– September for the years 1989–2003. The decision aid was modified for use with a Meteorological Interactive Data Display System (MIDDS) GUI in 2009 (Wheeler 2009) and then data from the 2004–2009 warm seasons was added in 2010 (Wheeler 2010). In 2011, data from the 2010 warm season was added to the decision aid, verification statistics were calculated for the Total Threat Score (TTS) and logistic regression analysis was performed on the 22-year severe weather database (Watson 2011). The 2011 results indicated that the logistic regression equation did not show an increase in skill over the previously developed TTS. Therefore, the only change to the version of the decision aid developed in Wheeler (2010) was the inclusion of 2010 data in the database. The new tool being reported in this article includes the warm season months in the 24 years 1989–2012 and was based on the 1500 UTC (1100 EDT) KXMR sounding instead of the 1000 UTC KXMR sounding and builds upon the previous work conducted in development of the 1000 UTC sounding-based tool. The 1500 UTC sounding was used to since it should provide better skill than the 1000 UTC sounding at the time 45th Weather Squadron (45 WS) usually decides to issue a severe weather watch for severe weather that could occur later that day. The benefits of the 1500 UTC sounding include showing how the boundary layer has modified in the three hours since sunrise, in addition