• When it comes to weather, the more you know and the sooner you know it, the safer and better prepared you can be.
• Later this year, NOAA's National Weather Service will usher into daily operations a sophisticated model called the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh, or HRRR, that will update forecasts hourly over the entire lower 48 United States at extremely sharp resolution using the latest observations from a network of ground and satellite-based sensors, radars and aircraft.
• The HRRR provides forecast information at a resolution four times finer than what is currently used in hourly updated NOAA models. This improvement in resolution from 13 to three kilometers is like giving forecasters an aerial photograph in which each pixel represents a neighborhood instead of a city.
• "When a typical thunderstorm is about 10 to 20 kilometers across, contains both upward and downward air currents as well as other features that give clues to its potential to create dangerous weather, it's important to be able to see what's happening inside the storm," said Stan Benjamin, a research meteorologist at NOAA's Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo., who leads the team that developed the HRRR. "It's a game-changer to go from 13 to three kilometers for model resolution."
• HRRR can differentiate between rotating storms, which are more likely to produce large tornadoes, and non-rotating thunderstorms that are often less danger

(Continued on page 9)