The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) has developed a prototype Warn-on-Forecast (WoF) system called NEWS-e (NSSL Experimental WoF System for ensembles). While the main focus of WoF is tornadic events, NEWS-e can be utilized for short-term probabilistic forecasts of other hazardous convective weather like heavy rainfall and flash floods. To improve forecasts of flash floods and nowcasting convective precipitation, accurate (i.e. amount, location, and timing) quantitative precipitation forecasts (QPF) from NWP models is crucial. Therefore to evaluate the capability of the NEWS-e system in forecasting heavy rainfall, retrospective short-term (0-6 h) probabilistic ensemble forecasts from several record breaking heavy rainfall and flash flood events will be generated. The initial and boundary conditions for the WRF-ARW model based 36-member storm-scale ensemble will be obtained from the Global Ensemble Forecast System and routinely available observations from METAR, marine, mesonet, ACARS, radiosonde, satellite and WDR-88D radars will be assimilated every 5 or 15 minutes. The probabilistic QPF generated from the continuous rapid update cycle ensemble will be presented at the workshop.

---

*email: Nusrat.Yussouf@noaa.gov
*Preference: Oral