Continuing with the theme of this week being Severe Weather Awareness Week in Iowa, today's featured plot looks at an analysis of convective watch issuance verification based on probabilities included in Mesoscale Convective Discussions (MCD) issued by the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). The SPC issues the MCD product to provide a short term update and analysis of the storm scale environment during active weather. Prior to most tornado or severe thunderstorm watch issuance, the SPC typically issues a MCD to highlight an area of interest and provides a confidence percentage on if a new watch may be soon issued. The association of an issued watch and the MCD product is not exact, so a simple algorithm was used with reasonable defaults to provide a verification of these percentages. The algorithm being the new watch needed to be issued with 2.5 hours and at least 50% of the watch polygon had to overlap with the MCD polygon. What is the moral of the story? Well, the high confidence MCDs typically get an issued watch, the lower confidence ones typically do not. The next time you read a MCD product from the SPC, check out the confidence noted and see if a subsequent watch is issued!

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Tags:   nws   spc   mcd   watcfh