EWP week 2 debrief

Here are some important bullet points from this week's EWP debrief...

UWCI and Cloud-top Cooling
- Forecasters wondering how well it will work in the Northeast... so often cirrus is in the area... Saw very few signals for yesterdays case.
- A little ahead of total lightning with yesterday's case... not like case event when it occurred at same time
- Cloud-top cooling more valuable for situational awareness than CI
- "Wonder if this type of product would be useful in something like guardian or alert type software, because not all people will be looking at it all the time."
- "Would be neat to look at if it saved all the locations where CI was occurring... would like to have the 60-min accumulated.. make it more like the hail tracks" (mentioned this was available)
- "I was watching a storm over Amarillo with 60+ dBZ after CI and there was no CG... I was waiting for lightning to happen because that's what we were told the research used to verify it... You can't use CG as a discriminator... you need total lightning."

OTTC
- All week continued to lag radar signals of severe.
- No thermal couplets saw in real time all week
- Forecasters understand it should work better with 2 km data.
- Similar comment a UWCI about accumulated product
- Overall was not very useful in warning operations.

Pseudo-GLM
- During real-time it was used a little bit, but the events were not as significant (37 flashes/2 min vs over 100 flashes/2 min in archive case)
- "What do these numbers mean?" training needed... need to see it several times over the summer to get used to it.
- "Might be useful to have a grad student or someone track particular features in radar with lightning flash rates to make some correlations... In theory you saw increases in reflectivity with jumps in lightning rates."..."You would have to prove to me that this jump rate is a precursor to tornado occurrence before I would be willing to use it in operations... more research."
- Regarding archive case... lightning jumped way up 5 mins before lightning... dropped significantly as tornado occurred.
- Need for trends (like a max VIL) noted... then they don't have to sample the whole thing every scan... Eric Bruning showed Schultz et al. 2009 work... Also mentioned flash rate trend swath... "Let's do that for next year, I would love to see that."
- 8km resolution made hard to see individual updraft areas... smoothing looked nice and confused forecasters making them think it was higher resolution, but in fact it was removing the peaks.
- "That's a neat product, but by having 1km visible and 0.5km visible on GOES-R, having an 8km product seems like it wouldn't provide as much information as we could be getting from other sources."
- Noticed that when it came to warning decisions, forecasters went straight to standard radar tools (reflectivity tilts, velocity)... "It's what we're trained to do... it's the best tool for those things."
- Issue with identifying polarity for flashes... Told that you can compare NLDN to the GLM
- May be more of an aviation, winter weather thing... "I see it really useful for convective snow events for picking up areas of convective snow."... "Winter storms are more costly for our area." Felt comfortable throwing in winter weather archive cases in Spring if necessary.

Overall / Training
- Felt very comfortable with using the products off the bat... "Eventually as the week progressed, I had my 4-panels set for the products that I found more useful to me."
- "Need a thorough review of how you come up with the values for these data."
- "I think you will find few forecasters that will readily abandon base data interpretation."
- "Try to make the experiment as real as possible as we would experience in the WFO... give us what we're used to."
- "Do more WES cases... don't go into real-time ops for marginal severe events... but it was nice to have live data since we didn't know what or if anything was going to happen."
- "Having some pre-set procedures would be good"
- "Maybe having a checklist would be good to make sure we check out all the products."
- First day come in early and do training day... felt like they were doing "hurry up and wait"