High Plains Severe Weather—Ten Years After

Abstract

More than a decade ago, a study was published that identified a short list of precursor conditions for severe thunderstorms on the High Plains of the United States. The present study utilizes data from the summer months of ten convective seasons to estimate how well the criteria fare as a method of forecasting severe weather days in that region. Results indicate that the technique produces a relatively high success rate in terms of detecting severe weather days for most years studied. False alarms are a bit high in an absolute sense (36% overall), but fall well within acceptable limits in the real world, where the philosophy of ?better to overwarn, than underforecast? prevails.