National Convective Weather Forecast - Attributes
The NCWF is updated every 5 minutes using the most current available data.
The NCWF is able to detect the existence of convective storm locations that agree very well with concurrent radar and lightning observations.
The NCWF is a high-resolution forecast impacting a relatively small volume of airspace rather than covering large boxed areas. The location, speeds and directions of movement of multiple convective storms are depicted individually.
The NCWF extrapolation forecasts are more accurate when predicting the location and size of well organized, unchanging convective storms moving at uniform speeds. The NCWF does not work well with sporadic, explosive cells developing and dissipating in minutes. In displaying forecast cell locations, the NCWF does NOT distinguish among level 3 through level 6 on the NCWF hazard scale (see table, below).
The NCWF may not detect or forecast:
- Some embedded convection
- Low-topped convection containing little or no cloud to ground lightning (such as may occur in cool air masses)
- Rapidly evolving convection
