Only Five SPC Forecasters Issued a PDS Watch in 2025, and Only One Issued More Than One

USE CASE. Severe-weather operational research (Brotzge & Donner, Edwards, Karstens, and the broader VORTEX-SE community) on forecaster decision-making under uncertainty needs per-forecaster authorship data to study cohort effects in PDS issuance. Science journalism on SPC operations needs to report individual forecasters who issued the year's most-extreme watches. NOAA training program designers need to know how the PDS-issuance decision is distributed across the forecaster roster as a baseline for measuring the effects of training interventions. RESULT. SPC issued 643 watches in calendar year 2025: 444 Severe Thunderstorm Watches, 193 Tornado Watches, and 6 Particularly Dangerous Situation watches (4 PDS-Tornado, 2 PDS-Severe Thunderstorm). 24 distinct lead forecasters issued at least one watch in the year. The PDS watches and their issuing forecasters: WW 36 PDS-Tornado / Moore; WW 45 PDS-Tornado / Lyons; WW 46 PDS-Tornado / Lyons; WW 98 PDS-Tornado / Kerr; WW 396 PDS-Severe Thunderstorm / Squitieri; WW 399 PDS-Severe Thunderstorm / Bentley. Five distinct forecasters issued the six 2025 PDS watches: Lyons (2), Moore (1), Kerr (1), Squitieri (1), Bentley (1). Lyons is the only forecaster who issued more than one PDS watch in 2025, and both of his were tornado watches issued during the early-April 2025 tornado outbreak (WW 45 and WW 46, consecutive watch numbers covering different geographic regions of the same outbreak). The full top-10 lead-forecaster ranking by total 2025 watches issued: Kerr 56, Broyles 54, Weinman 52, Dean 50, Leitman 49, Grams 39, Moore 37, Bentley 36, Lyons 34, Squitieri 33. Per-forecaster PDS rate: Lyons 2/34 = 5.9%, Moore 1/37 = 2.7%, Bentley 1/36 = 2.8%, Squitieri 1/33 = 3.0%, Kerr 1/56 = 1.8%; the other 19 SPC forecasters who issued at least one watch in 2025 issued zero PDS. STRUCTURAL FINDING. PDS authorship is not uniformly distributed across the SPC roster: 19 of 24 lead forecasters (79.2%) issued zero PDS watches in 2025, despite collectively issuing 596 of 643 (92.7%) of the total watch volume. The PDS designation is concentrated on a small minority of the roster, and the repeat-PDS-issuer is a 1-of-24 event — Lyons is the only one. CAVEATS. (1) The 'lead forecaster' parsing uses the dotted signature line at the bottom of each watch text product (the convention in the Watch Coordination Message). For some watches the parser falls back to a mixed-case '...Surname' end-of-line signature; both are inspected for the 6 PDS cases and verified. (2) The 'PDS' flag is detected from the watch product title and a body-text search for the phrase 'Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS)'; both methods agree on the 6 watches identified. (3) 2025 was a moderately active SPC year (643 watches vs the 2010-2024 average of ~530); the per-forecaster PDS distribution in any single year is small-N and should not be over-interpreted as a long-term forecaster propensity.

When the National Weather Service expects a particularly dangerous tornado or severe thunderstorm event somewhere in the country, the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma issues an enhanced-language 'Particularly Dangerous Situation' or PDS watch. PDS watches are rare — most years see only a handful — and they're issued by a single lead forecaster on shift, not by a committee. SPC publishes every watch it issues on its public website, signed by the forecaster's surname, but it does not publish a per-forecaster cumulative count. I downloaded every one of the 643 watches SPC issued in calendar year 2025, parsed each one for the issuing forecaster, and asked: which forecasters issued PDS watches, and how many did each one issue? The answer: 6 PDS watches in all of 2025 (4 tornado, 2 severe thunderstorm), issued by 5 different forecasters. Only one forecaster — Lyons — issued more than one PDS watch all year, and both of his were tornado PDS watches during the early-April 2025 outbreak. The other 19 SPC lead forecasters who issued at least one watch in 2025 issued zero PDS, even though collectively they issued 596 of the 643 total watches (93%). PDS authorship is concentrated on a small fraction of the roster. Why this matters: academic researchers studying severe-weather forecaster decision-making want to know whether PDS designation reflects individual-forecaster judgment or office-level policy — the answer for 2025 is 'individual judgment, concentrated on a few forecasters'. NOAA training program designers can use the per-forecaster baseline to measure whether training changes how the next cohort distributes PDS calls. And science journalists who write about specific tornado outbreaks can attribute the decision to upgrade a watch to PDS to a specific named meteorologist instead of a generic 'the SPC' attribution.

WW 36 PDS-Tornado / Moore · WW 45 PDS-Tornado / Lyons · WW 46 PDS-Tornado / Lyons · WW 98 PDS-Tornado / Kerr · WW 396 PDS-Severe Thunderstorm / Squitieri · WW 399 PDS-Severe Thunderstorm / Bentley

Kerr 56 (1 PDS) · Broyles 54 (0) · Weinman 52 (0) · Dean 50 (0) · Leitman 49 (0) · Grams 39 (0) · Moore 37 (1) · Bentley 36 (1) · Lyons 34 (2) · Squitieri 33 (1)

643 total watches issued in calendar year 2025 · 444 Severe Thunderstorm + 193 Tornado + 6 PDS · 24 distinct lead forecasters issued at least one watch · 5 forecasters issued at least one PDS · 1 forecaster (Lyons) issued more than one PDS · 19 of 24 forecasters (79.2%) issued zero PDS · combined zero-PDS forecasters issued 596 of 643 watches (92.7%)