EWP daily briefing... 5/20/2010

EWP 1pm daily briefing on May 20, 2010
Here is some very interesting dialogue from today's EWP 1pm daily briefing. Kris Bedka and Justin Sieglaff posed questions to the forecasters regarding the UWCI and OTTC products and these were they're responses...

In the case of multiple towers with equal weak reflectivities on radar, would CI detection over one and not the other add value to your forecast?

"It's plausible. If that's the way it play out. It would be hard to objective analyze that all the time."

"It does have utility in determining which storm will be the dominant storm."

"Depends on the environment."

When visible satellite is not available, is it (CI detections) even more useful? (this was simulated in yesterday's IOP for one forecaster)

"Yes, absolutely" (also agreed by the other forecasters in theory)

Does a continued signal in CI over one storm provide increased confidence?

"The opposite may be more useful in determining if the storm way dying. It's the end of an event that gives people the most trouble." (forecasters reiterated the need for object tracking)

General discussion on overshooting-tops...

"Overshooting-tops are much more common than I was led to believe in school."

"We did observe that the reflectivity core aloft did intensify when an overshoot was detected."

"Would be interesting to see how they correlate with the occurrence of BWERs. If we had temporal continuity (a continuous) detection, we would expect to see a BWER."

"Overshooting dissipation would be interesting in determining the occurrence of tornado or large hail at the surface."

"If we had rapidly updating satellite, it would be much more useful."

"Might also be useful to have a OT track product... would help in determining storm (updraft) motion."

In addition, we discussed the inclusion of satellite data into an end-to-end tracking system to better compare to radar signatures objectively. It was also noted that next year, it is expected that the EWP will have a more robust AWIPS system that will be able to ingest a total feed (similar to a WFO), that will be on all year that can have new experimental products running on it constantly. This will provide year-round testing of products, rather than a month long experiment. They also plan on having this ready earlier in the year before next year's experiment so dataflow issues are reduced.

We showed the NSSL-WRF simulated reflectivity and lightning threat output for the weather briefing to help decide location for which we would localize the AWIPS stations. Simulated reflectivity showed a large line of storms moving through the area sometime around 00Z. The lightning threat fields showed that the most most lightning activity was expected along the southern edge of the line of storms as the evening progressed. We are hoping that we can see if the addition of lightning data on this southern edge will help determine which areas are the bigger threat during the decision making process for warning along the entire line. Since the storms aren't expected to form in the Huntsville area until the later-half of the EWP IOP, it was decided that we would focus on S. TX for the first half of the day, and then following the dinner break we would switch to Huntsville, AL domain to get some pseudo-GLM demonstration. Will provide updates as they arrive.