Contest News

From it's inception in 2018, our contest was named the "Great Plains Tornado Target Contest". However, with our move to expand the number of participants, and attract a nationwide audience, we dropped our plains-centric forecasting system. We now include all of CONUS in our forecast regions.

With this expansion, and the growing load of work on the backend of the system, we are lightening the load on both forecasters and administrators over the [traditional] weekend. Limiting those days to bonus and challenge forecasts.

• Only limited updating will occur over the weekend.

Feedback from previous years has helped us come to the conclusion that forecasters desire to ability to "call it quits" and not forecast. Thus, this year you now have to chose whether you want to forecast or if you don't think tornadoes will form.

• This function is not a get out of jail free card. If someone choses "No Tornado" and there are tornadoes, they will assessed a penalty. Those penalties scale with the risk level. See "Rules and Scoring" for more on these penalties.

• Because forecasters now have the option to skip a forecast on those not-so-good sorta days, we will bring 2% marginal risk forecasts back into our forecast rotation.