FAQ's

1. Go check the forecaster information sheet, and find your forecaster number!

2. Go to the forecast submission page, and fill out your info

3. Select "Yes Tornado" or "No Tornado"

4. For a "Yes Tornado" forecast, you must provide latitude and longitude information

5. Hit submit (don't forget this step if you selected "No Tornado")

You sure can! All you have to do to amend your forecast is use the forecast submission again! The code will overwrite your old forecast(s) as long as the new one is still before the time that it was due (1600Z). You can amend your forecast as many times as your heart desires.

Monday through Friday no matter what SPC risk! Not on the weekends.  The Verification page doubles as a contest calendar.

You can submit a forecast anytime from 00Z to 16Z. There is a Zulu clock on the homepage and the forecast submission page.

Nothin'. Come back tomorrow. But don't worry too much, there are no penalties for missed forecasts.

Forecasts can be submitted between 00Z and 16Z. There is a Zulu clock on the homepage and the forecast submission page.

This is a complicated problem. First, I will lay out the easy stuff, then I will lay out some more difficult scenarios.

• If, when you filled out your forecast, you entered a town/city in the form. That can be used to correct the issue by contacting the webmaster/admin.

• If you didn't fill out the city/town of your target location... there is nothing that can be done to remedy the issue. This is why adding that information, though optional, is extremely important!

This is commonly caused by "fat fingering" the longitude or latitude in some way. The webmasters sometimes catch these errors and correct them. This is especially important because reentering verification for a forecast is a time consuming process. However, the bulk of this responsibility is on the forecaster to quality control for themselves (or their friends/colleagues).

Okay, so here is the complicated scenario...

Let's say there is a 10% risk in central Nebraska near a triple point, with a heavily capped dryline extending south to Texas (2%). Let's say a forecaster enters an incorrect latitude for their forecast and ends up with a forecast point in Oklahoma (all by themselves). Morning convection destroys the environment in NE... but one cell manages to break the cap in OK and goes bonkers and produces several tornadoes. This is what we would like to call "failing upward." So how would we handle this...

1. Forecast city is labelled Hastings, NE ~ Welp, sorry but you're getting moved back to Nebraska to fail with the rest of us.

2. Forecast city is left blank ~ congrats, you beat the system. By the grace of a higher power, you win and there is nothing we can do to take it away from you.

These contingencies keep people from essentially using a "fat fingered" forecast to have 2 forecast points. There is really no other feasible way to handle this until Google Maps let's us embed their api into forms for free.

We isolate SPC storm reports that mention landspouts or gustnadoes in their remarks. They are removed from the scoring unless the storm is considered threatening by the NWS via a tornado warning (< 15 miles).

1. Storm Prediction Center filtered tornado reports: SPC Link 

2. NOAA Damage Assessment Toolkit data points, lines, and shapes (when available): DAT Link 

Of course, people get excited to see scores! However, reports, and especially damage surveys take time. We try to run verification as fast as possible. The average event can be verified within about 5 days, with bigger events taking a week or two to gather all the information.

You can notify a TTC admin, using our form, to have the event be rescored! There is a link to the form on our homepage, or you can use this one here: Link 

We take the average latitude and longitudes of everyone who forecasted (once they have been reprojected) and score it as if consensus is a real person. If only a small number of folks forecast, or if the majority of forecasters select "No Tornado", so too does consensus.

Due to popular demand in 2022, we added a scored point based on the 14Z nadocast. Check out all of the nadocast forecasts here: http://data.nadocast.com/ We use forecast data from the 14Z output to select a point based on the weighting of the regions of different forecast probabilities.

Most of the time this is obvious. Where is the SPC outlook? But for the harder scenarios...

• If the outlook crosses over the borders defined on our Information and Scoring page

  • Where is majority of the highest tornado probability polygon?

• If there is no SPC outlook?

  • Where is the majority of the general thunderstorm polygons?

• The SPC maps is empty?

  • Not even the admins know how to handle this yet...

You can travel to this link: Unsubscribe and fill out the form. It will likely take a few days to be removed from the email listserv, so you have some time to change your mind if you wish!

There is a link to a form where you can report potential misconduct at the bottom of the homepage or you can use this link! Report Misconduct

Contact Kyle or ask one of the Discord moderators. We can probably set this up for you as long as there is sufficient interest!