NWS Melbourne Impact Meteorology Unit Page

Innovative Meteorological Products, Applications, and Collaborative Techniques

The NWS Melbourne IMPACT Meteorology Unit (IMU) seeks to develop innovative products and applications for the improvement of high-impact weather forecasts and warnings within East Central Florida � ultimately, acting to save lives and protect property. The transition of such efforts into the operational forecast process achieves many benefits, including improved forecaster efficiency and enhanced communication of daily weather hazard threats to proactively enable decision-makers for individual and emergency planning, response, and recovery.

Impact Weather Updates
Local weather specialists provide rapid-update, expert commentary covering impacts expected within the next 8 hours. A web log system is utilized to provide a nearly constant stream of free-flowing information such as details concerning initial lightning storm development (when and where), intensity (typical, strong, severe), and duration. Graphical products will be used to help depict forecaster expectations.

Weather Conditions - Current
Locally generated analyses depict, in high detail, the current state of the atmosphere across Florida every 15 minutes. The graphics incorporate data from a large number of official and nonofficial sources, including airport and NASA observations, as well as information from school and private citizen weather stations. All available data is assimilated within a model-initialized atmosphere to provide a comprehensive view of the current weather conditions.

User Selectable Precipitation
This is a product of the WSR-88D radar system. Created daily, the product depicts rainfall as estimated by the radar for the 24 hour period ending at 1200 UTC on the current day. The unit of measurement is inches, and the scale is at the top of the graphic. Please check the date of the product.

Model Forecasts - Today/Tonight
A suite of forecast graphics is locally generated for the next 24 hours using the current weather conditions (above) as a starting point. The model produces forecasts at high resolution across Florida eight times per day, with graphical output available in 1-hour increments. Forecasters synthesize numerous different numerical models to arrive at the final 'official' forecast.

Weather Hazards - Today/Tonight
Several times each day, forecasters provide a graphical assessment of the threat potential for more than a dozen possible hazards which can impact East Central Florida. The graphical hazards cover the 'today and tonight' period and depict weather threats on a 5-level scale from "no threat" to an "extreme threat" and they illustrate the geographic extent of the threat areas.

Lightning Threat
Over 10 years of lightning data are used to produce a climatology (history) of ground strike density and frequency, based on different prevailing wind patterns. These data are used by forecasters as an initial indication of lightning storm occurrence, then they are manually adjusted after taking into account other variables, as well as interjecting forecaster expertise.

Turning Science into Service

Disclaimer: These products and images will not be available at all times, may be terminated at any time, and timely delivery is not guaranteed. Before using information obtained from these products, special attention should be given to the date & time of the data and products being displayed. Consult official NWS products obtained through an official dissemination system.