Several interactions have taken place between the NWSFO in San Francisco (Redwood City) and San Francisco State University under the auspices of the COMET Cooperative Program. One of these (the customization of the UA program) developed to the point that it was funded as a separate Partners Project. The fundamental goal of the Cooperative Project was to stimulate joint research and collegial interactions between NWSFO forecasters and university faculty. Funding was awarded in support of personnel and material needed to archive plot files and sounding data which will be used in post-mortem case studies.
The university's Principal Investigator (Dr. John Monteverdi) served on the WSFO team sent to survey damage from the 3 December 1992 tornado in the Santa Rosa area. The field survey corroborated reports that damage was caused by at least two F1 (possibly F2) tornadoes. He is currently coauthoring a Technical Attachment with Warning Preparedness Meteorologist John Quadros on these and other California tornadoes in December 1992.
A discussion of the usefulness of the SHARP Workstation programs in forecasting a supercellular cold sector tornado event in north-central California was recently published as a Technical Memorandum by the Western Region. A second collaborative study entitled "Convective and rotational parameters associated with three tornado episodes in northern and central California" has been accepted for publication as a Technical Memorandum and was presented at the 1993 PACLIM conference in Pacific Grove. A third study entitled "Explosive mesoscale cyclogenesis along the California coast: a subtropical example of a 'polar hurricane'?" is in preparation, co-authored by the University's Principal Investigator, two staff members from the NWSFO (Lead Forecaster and Oceanographer), and a satellite meteorologist from NASA and will be submitted to a journal for publication.
In addition to the research activities, WSFO forecasters and oceanographers, the area manager, and the deputy meteorologist-in-charge have been involved in presenting several seminars to students at the university. Similarly, Dr. Monteverdi has given several seminars to the Lead Forecasters on the integration of subsidiary pc-run guidance into the operational environment.