AVA MARIE: My name is Ava Marie. I'm the morning meteorologist here at WBAL TV. I don't think people realizewhere their weather data comes from. They get the forecast, possibly on their mobile device, from their TV, and they don't really think about everything that went in to make that forecast. I sift through tons and tons of data, whether it be satellite information,radar, weather observations. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without all the data provided from the National Weather Service and NOAA. When it comes to making a forecast for our local area, we use our own knowledge and expertise to fine-tune that forecast for our viewers, but the initial data is really reliant on the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, the Storm Prediction Center, all those major entities that have a lot of knowledge and experience in those specialized types of weather, and we really look to them as the authority on those types of situations. So this is what's known as the computer model. People have probably started to hear that word more and more often. And basically, these are run by supercomputers, many of which are run by the government, in order to let us know what these supercomputers think is going to happen with the weather. So they are ingesting tons of data, whether it's through satellite, radar, weather observations, and using mathematics, trying to interpret what might happen out in the future. It displays it in a map here. And so these are what we use to analyze the overall weather patterns, how we think they're going to change, and therefore how it applies to the forecast. As a meteorologist at a TV station, I think it's really important that we have a great relationship with our local forecasting offices, whether it's being able to contact them directly through the chat groups, or reading their forecast discussions. That information isvery important to the decisions that I make each and every day.