Post-mortems are critical to evaluating the performance of the National Weather Service, whether at a national level or for a forecast office during a particular event. A post-mortem should be conducted after every severe weather event, or any significant event, whether the event was a complete success or if there were some problems. Post-mortems can not only tell us about the past but can help point us in the direction of needed research, technology, policy, or procedures.

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The Severe Weather/Flash Flood Warning Decision Making (WDM) Workshops were held from 2000 to 2003 and covered a variety of topics, including post-mortems. Use this Post-Mortem Template created in the 2003 edition of the workshop to assist in your post-mortem process.

Use the following NWS Directives to assist in the post-mortem process:

• Directive 10-511: WFO Severe Weather Products Specification
• Directive 10-517: Multi-Purpose Weather Products Specification
• Directive 10-922: WFO Hydrologic Products Specification
• Directive 10-1601: Verification Procedures
• Directive 10-1602: Service Evaluation
• Directive 10-1603: Significant Event Reporting
• Directive 10-1604: Post-Storm Data Acquisition
• Directive 10-1605: Storm Data Preparation
• Directive 10-1606: Service Assessment
• Directive 10-1607: Office Evaluation

WDTB offers an Instructor-Led Training course on effective office strategies associated with post-mortems (AWOC Core 3 - Lesson 3: Learning from Post-Mortems). The presentation associated with the teletraining is available upon request to those who have completed this particular lesson.

AWOC Core IC 4 - Lesson 4: Social Science Aspects of Post Mortems

Communicating Risks in High-Impact Events: Post-Mortems

Conducting damage surveys allows the office to accurately determine the intensity of and the impacts of severe weather hazards, especially those of strong straight-line winds and tornadoes. Use the following modules and courses to assist in your damage surveys.

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EF-Scale Training:

• Lesson 1: Introducing the Enhanced Fujita Scale
• Lesson 2: Damage Surveys with the Enhanced Fujita Scale
• EF-Scale Tool Kit

SPC Enhanced Fujita Scale Tornado Damage Page - Shows the derivation of the EF-Scale from the original Fujita Scale and provides details on all 28 damage indicators.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) can allow you determine the factor(s) that results in an outcome (e.g., a missed event). While the term "root cause" implies there's one thing at the bottom of it all, it really is not the case. One can uncover a number of "roots" with numerous "offshoots" which have all contributed to the outcome. Basically, it will allow you to identify a number of contributing factors to an outcome and allow you to learn from them.

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A portion of the WDTB-based Instructor-Led Training course on effective office strategies associated with post-mortems (AWOC Core 3 - Lesson 3: Learning from Post-Mortems) includes information on RCAs. The presentation associated with the teletraining is available upon request to those who have completed this particular lesson.

This lesson is associated with an RCA Tool-Kit, which can be downloaded for use here.

SPC Enhanced Fujita Scale Page

A Guide to F-Scale Damage Assessment

NWS Tornado Surveys and the Impact on the National Tornado Database by Daniel McCarthy

The Human Factors Analysis and Classification System - HFACS by Scott A. Shappell and Douglas A. Wiegmann