Hoot Weather Products

08/27/2015

Effective 8/27/15 Hoot will be experiencing periodic outages on nearly all data available to the public. This is due in part to server renovations and a major UI overhaul that is expected to begin next month. We apologize for the recent outages on data, and will do our best to try and keep things up and running as we transition to a new system.We thank you for your patience and continuing to support our organization.

06/14/2015

The GFS, NAM, and satellite products on the Hoot site are now updating again after a data source issue was fixed. You can thank a ghost of hoot past for fixing the issues.

02/27/2015

Yesterday afternoon, the decision was made to cancel today's opening ceremony due to weather where our speakers were coming from and due to weather here. We will let you know when it reschedules.

02/25/2015

Don't forget to join us THIS FIRDAY for the opening ceremony of the new Oklahoma Weather Lab forecasting space!

The time is almost upon us.

After a year of planning and hard work on multiple fronts, it's finally time for the grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony of the new Oklahoma Weather Laboratory forecast space! We have all sorts of new toys and technology, so come celebrate with us as we enter into a new chapter of OWL history!

02/23/2015

The time is almost upon us.

After a year of planning and hard work on multiple fronts, it's finally time for the grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony of the new Oklahoma Weather Laboratory forecast space! We have all sorts of new toys and technology, so come celebrate with us as we enter into a new chapter of OWL history!

02/03/2015

Do not forget about this excellent forecasting resource provided by the NOAA Storm Prediction Center. It will be broadcast live for those who are not fortunate enough to be in Norman!

01/25/2015

Working on the presentation for next week's OWL general meeting. If you want to learn how to install, operate, and interpret SHARPpy on your own computer, be sure to come!

I'll be covering not only how to operate it, but how to interpret the various indices and routines that get displayed in the window. If you want to know what a storm slinky is, and why you care about it, or perhaps how to properly use the Hazardous Wx. Type window, then come with your laptops.

Wednesday night, 6:00 PM, METR 1313.

01/25/2015

Please take the time to look over this excellent opportunity to learn forecasting from the outstanding folks at the NOAA Storm Prediction Center. There will be forecasting training sessions that the SPC will conduct in conjunction with the OU Student Chapter of the American Meteorological Society, and taught by lead forecaster Rich Thompson. This is open to ANYONE and EVERYONE, and will also be recorded/live streamed for those out of state.

We are extremely pleased to announce that we have partnered with the Storm Prediction Center's Lead Forecaster Rich Thompson to offer a unique series of workshops detailing the meteorology of tornado forecasting! If you want to hear from a longstanding professional about the process of making the forecasts for severe weather, this is for you. Anyone is welcome to attend these free workshops, either in person or online; see the attached flier for more details!

Here's the current schedule:

February 3rd – Sounding analysis and synoptic meteorology (lifted parcels, Q-G theory, etc.)

February 10th – Severe storm ingredients (low-level moisture and lapse rates)

February 17th – Severe storm ingredients (vertical shear and lift)

March 3rd – Supercell and tornado conceptual models (plus composite parameters)

March 10th – Tornado patterns (synoptic and mesoscale)

March 24th – Convective mode forecasting (squall lines vs. discrete cells)

April 7th – Tornado parameter climatology (spatial and temporal distributions of CAPE and shear)

April 14th – Numerical models and statistical techniques (convective schemes and post processing)

April 21st – Real-time forecasting exercise

01/04/2015

For those of you attending the Annual American Meteorological Society meeting in Phoenix this next week:

If you are going to be in attendance, and you've appreciated the new soundings that were rolled out on the website this year, come to the poster sessions on Monday and Tuesday to meet the SHARPpy development team and try a live demo of the desktop application.
https://ams.confex.com/ams/95Annual/webprogram/Paper270233.html

12/07/2014

There was a recent bug with our observed and model soundings that caused the program to crash as of 11/30/14, with no data updating since. Our friends in the National Weather Service were the ones who brought this to our attention, so thank you very much to those of you who use this product regularly for letting us know! Model data should update once again over the next hour.

http://hoot.metr.ou.edu/models/hrrr/fsound/

The Oklahoma Weather Lab at the University of Oklahoma produces an extensive array of model products from the GFS, ECMWF, NAM, RAP, HRRR, and our own WRF-ARW model. We strive to present the most accurate and up to date products of any data site, and we make every effort to make these the most timely…

11/15/2014

We've been experimenting with some winter weather forecasting tools to implement into SHARPpy. Check out the winter inset in this forecast sounding for some snow in Norman tomorrow!

10/29/2014

Winter is just around the corner...
Don't worry, we'll have you covered!