In the late evening of the 18th January I read the saddening news on Bluesky that Charles A. Doswell III has died in the age of 79 years. Doswell played an important role researching the basics of severe thunderstorms, supercell storms and tornadoes. I did not stand close to him and I had not have any contact or attended his talks or workshops in the last ten years. I did however take part in his one-day convective forecast workshop in October 2011, during the European Conference on Severe Storms (ECSS) in Palma de Mallorca. Doswell has been one of the old school guys who put much emphasis on haptic learning. We used large prints of surface weather charts to determine frontal systems or other boundaries to get a feeling for where convective weather could take place. Nothing like this was or is used anymore in European weather services, especially not at the private weather service where I was working at this time. Nevertheless I was taught the ingredients-based methodology going far beyond the index-based methodology which was sometimes overly present in this period. Doswell was the lead author with two other authorities in this area, Brooks and Maddox, of a famous paper about ingredients for flash floods (Doswell et al. 1996).

„The concept of ingredients-based forecasting is discussed as it might apply to a broader spectrum of forecast events than just flash flood forecasting.“

And it did! The concept has been extended to severe convective weather forecasting where it is now a standard forecasting procedure, at least for forecasters who excel their job wholeheartedly. Instead of relying only on cape, showalter, significant tornado parameter or other multiple-variable indices, he emphasized the overlap of moisture, instability and lift for deep moist convection, and wind shear for organized convection including mesocyclones.