Mesoscale Discussions are here!

Last 22-23 February the ESTOFEX team congregated in Wiener Neustad in Austria. We decided to stop with Forecast Updates in favour of a new product, the Mesoscale Discussion.
The first public Mesoscale Discussion was issued for 1300-1700Z today by our forecaster Georg Pistotnik:

The severe weather reports from ESSL's European Severe Weather Database are also plotted as they came in.

A Mesoscale Discussion (MD) is intended to be a short text containing a diagnosis of ingredients for severe convective storms during the current day, with a validity of 2-6 hours. It may describe one or more areas of interest indicated by green contours. Like the daily Forecast it can also contain information about the expected storm mode and associated severe weather phenomena, but is not translated into threat levels and thunderstorm probabilities. A Mesoscale Discussion can be issued whenever a forecaster wishes to describe the current situation in an area in detail.

Note that Forecast Updates will no longer be issued. The Update was a product which changed the status of our threat levels. However, forecaster availability and the time required to decide collectively on a Forecast Update made it troublesome to issue it on time when the situation changed.

Soon we will also post our daily forecast map to our Facebook page.