I enjoyed the opportunity to speak at Tom Skilling’s Severe Weather Seminar at Fermi Lab on Saturday, April 30. During my talk I mentioned some web sites that I use for looking at past severe weather events. As promised, I am posting them here for you to use.
Storm Prediction Center
In the “reports” section of the SPC website you will find day-to-day reports of severe weather with maps and tables describing the activity on each day. Farther down the page are reports and maps for each year and other products. I find this a real gold mine for severe weather information.
Screenshots (click to enlarge):
Experimental Local Storm Reports
The San Diego NWS site has “experimental” local storm reports presented with Google Maps. The interface allows to you to selected the kinds of weather reports you want to see on the map, as well as a date range. Icons are used to represent different types of events and you can click on them to get more details.
Screenshots (click to enlarge):
National Severe Storm Laboratory
The National Severe Storm Laboratory in Normal OK has two radar-derived products useful for severe weather studies: a) rotation tracks and b) MESH (Maximum Expected Size Hail). I found this site to be more of a challenge to use than some of the others. Even so, the results are spectacular as shown below with the rotation tracks from April 27-28, 2011.