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Hello and welcome to the National Weather Service online video tour!
I'm Charlie Woodrum and I'm one of the meteorologists here at
the Weather Forecast Office in Pittsburgh.
The office in Pittsburgh is one of the 122 across the country.
We service western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio,
northern West Virginia, and one county in western Maryland.
The layout of the Pittsburgh office is a unique one.
Most offices are a typical cookie-cutter shape on one level.
The Weather Forecast Office in Pittsburgh
is a multi-level building with the management
and electronic technicians offices on the top floor
and operations on the bottom floor.
While in operations, maintaining situational awareness is very important.
So we have a situational awareness display
Where we monitor guidance from the National Centers,
regional weather, and also our local and national television coverage.
This is what a workstation looks like
for our meteorologists here at the Weather Service. We use a weather monitoring
program called the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System or AWIPS for short.
And with AWIPS, we can look at
model data and see the latest runs. We can monitor the radar
which we used to issue warnings through a program called WarnGen.
We can also look at satellite imagery and also issue our forecasts
and our watches, warnings, and advisories through a program
called the Graphical Forecast Editor, or GFE for short.
We also use two screens for our personal computer where we can access the Internet and get to
our or email and other information.
Forecasters use a program called the Graphical Forecast Editor, or GFE,
to draw their forecast so it can be easily communicated
to the public. And they use GFE to make decisions
with things like, "What's the high temperature going to be today?" "What's the chance of precipitation?"
"How strong are the winds going to be?"
And they can edit each weather element using this program and quickly produce a forecast.
To edit a forecast grid,
it just takes a few simple clicks forecaster to make changes to the forecast.
They can easily adjust the temperature, for example, up
or down, or highlight an area that they want to adjust.
These can all be done quickly with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Forecasters can utilize the Graphical Forecast Editor
to issue long fused watches, warnings, and advisories -
everything from a winter storm warning
to a heat advisory.
To do that, they can go to "Make Hazard", select the county they want to issue
the hazard for,
select the hazard type, then
select the start time and end time for the hazard, and then run the hazard.
To issue warnings, we use a program called WarnGen.
You click on the yellow box in the upper right hand corner to
load WarnGen out of AWIPS
and then this polygon pops up from the point. You track your storm motion
and then it draws a polygon for you. Then you select what kind of warning you want to
issue, in this case a severe thunderstorm warning. You say
your basis for the warning, the threats involved, in this case we use "Golf Ball Size Hail" -
and "Calls to Action" that you might want to add.
Once you have the polygon in the correct shape that you want,
you just click the "Create to Text" button and it
creates all of the information in the warning automatically based off the polygon that you drew.
WarnGen then produces the text product
for the warning that you wanted to issue. And it mentions the
time the warning was issued, the area it was issued for,
how long it was issued until, the hazards involved with the
thunderstorm, and the locations that will be impacted.
This is the Pittsburgh WSR-88D. It stands for
Weather Surveillance Radar. It was commissioned in 1988 and it's a doppler radar.
The doppler radar ends up working by
detecting a pulse or some type of precipitation as it comes towards
the radar and the frequently ends up changing as it hits the particle.
The Pittsburgh radar was a beta site
for getting dual-pol installed. It was one of the first half dozen radars in the
country to get this. Instead of a pulse hitting a particle
in measuring one dimension of a particle, now any thing that the radar hits is sampled in two dimensions -
so that we can actually end up getting
a horizontal and vertical size.
Hi. I am Art Brown.
I am the electronic systems analyst for the Weather Forecast here at Pittsburgh.
We are responsible for all
of the equipment. That includes the AWIPS computers,
all of the networks. We have 3 different networks
and we are reponsible for all them, all of the email
everything coming in, going into this office. We have 7
ASOS sites in our County Warning Area that we are responsible for maintenance on -
software upgrades, and all of the maintenance on that.
And we have the NEXRAD Radar -
we are responsible for all of the modifications, all of the up-keep,
and all of the maintenance on that system.
Hi. My name is Fred McMullen and I'm the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh.
I'm going to talk a little about the Storm Ready program the National Weather Service does.
This program has partners with counties, townships,
special event venues, universities,
through advance planning, research,
education, and awareness, these communities become what we call Storm Ready.
Through all that information they have the infrastructure in place
that they can withstand the onslaught of severe weather.
The Skywarn program is a
program of volunteers nationwide of approximately 300,000 people -
locally in the parts of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, western Maryland
and northern West Virginia. We have about 4,000 volunteers
who are our eyes and our ears for storms as they come across the area.
The Skywarn program is usually rolled out in the spring time where we go out to the counties
and give presentations about what we're looking for to become a Storm Spotter, what to observe,
how to report hail, wind damage, how to observe flooding.
But we also give safety tips as well because weather can be a hazard if you don't know the proper steps to take.
Our office has unique capabilities where we can go out schools, universities,
counties, civic groups, kiwanis clubs
and talk about the weather. We service all types
of demographics from young children to senior citizens.
We talk about what's current with the weather,
maybe severe weather history across aparts of the area,
we give preparedness talks to people in hospitals so they know what to do
if a tornado warnings issued or a severe thunderstorm warning is issued and we
also do demonstrations out at
PNC Park Pittsburgh for Pirates Weather Day. We have a various programs that we can go out in
the community and train folks on safety measures to take
when if they're outside and a storm happens, what they should do.
Hi. I'm Bob Reed. I'm one of the forecasters here at the NWS Forecast Office in Pittsburgh.
One of the things we do here here
is aviation forecasting.
We issue aviation forecast for 24-hour periods
for nine different airports across eastern Ohio,
northern West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. One of the airports we forecast for
is the Pittsburgh International Airport.
The harmless weather instrument that collects valuable data from the
atmosphere is called the "radiosonde". The humidity sensor
is located in the front of the sonde while the battery component
is located in the back of the sond. There are even mailing instructions
to mail the instrument back to the National Weather Service, if found.
And the temperature sensor is located at the top.
There are 70 offices across the continental United States that
launch weather balloons at the same time. Our office launches weather balloons
once in the early morning and once the evening.
As soon as the radiosonde is released,
it gets tracked instantly using GPS until the flight is terminated.
To visit our web page, go to
From there you can access our point and click forecast where you could find weather information
for your local area.