Day One

Today marks the beginning of the 2010 Spring Experiment. Of course, any new experiment will have it's share of problems. Today was spent making sure all of the products we are providing to the EFP and EWP come in correctly and display properly. The SATCAST convective initiation nowcast product was not coming in to the HWT's N-AWIPS systems until the end of the day. We have finally convinced ourselves that we have solved all the problems with the dataflow and will watch it tomorrow for any irregularities. The NSSL-WRF simulated satellite imagery and lightning threat were being delivered successfully to the EFP within the HWT's N-AWIPS systems and some participants have started looking at them during forecast exercises (see image below). The 0-3 hour severe hail probability and Nearcast products were also available.

EFP participant Chris Melick looking at NSSL-WRF simulated water vapor imagery on HWT N-AWIPS system.

The UWCI, CTC and OTTC products were successfully being provided within the EWP's AWIPS and WDSSII systems. However, the thermal couplet output of the OTTC was not being received and this issue has been raised to the product developers. This is being solved and should be available by next week's activities. The 8-km pseudo-GLM product is available for the OK area only at this point, but efforts are being done to obtain this data from all four networks and should be completed by the end of this week. Today also marked the first occurrence of the GOES-R product training within the EWP. Training was completed on time and forecasters seemed very receptive of the information. More detailed feedback will be captured within the surveys collected by the EWP following every IOP.

Today's IOP within the EWP was very light and basically consisted of familiarizing all the forecasters with the systems while bugs were worked out. The GOES-R Proving Ground participants did notice that the 30-minute full-disk and calibration scans around 0 UTC adversely affected the ability of forecasters to evaluate the UWCI, CTC and OTTC products. However, there were moments where the OTTC product was making detections with some severe convection over S. TX (see images below). Detailed feedback was not captured since the IOP today was informal and no surveys were done. The 0 UTC scan limitations was mentioned to the EWP coordinators, as well as the forecasters as something to be aware of. Forecasters also discovered other necessary steps to display the data properly within AWIPS that were unknown by the EWP coordinators. This information has also been captured and will be passed on to future participants.

Overshooting-top detections (top) and concurrent visible imagery (bottom) for 0015 UTC on 18 May, 2010