During today's debrief of the EWP participants, I was able to ask them some specific questions and get feedback on their experience during the week with the GOES-R Proving Ground products. They provided some new ideas as well as some constructive comments and criticism. Here is a breakdown of the information I captured during the discussion...
REGARDING UWCI AND CTC
- In marginal cases when we're not sure whether storms will go it may be more useful
- Nighttime when no visible is around it is definitely more useful
- In winter nighttime snow events, low top convection close to radar not detected... cooling tops earlier might give clue of snow showers occurring... also upslope snow showers, where mountains inhibit radar reflectivities would be a good thing to see
- Didn't have enough time with the products to determine if CI or CTC more useful
- Was slower than radar constantly
- They realize that the products are meant for better temporal and spatial resolutions, but hard to see it's use when not available
- Just because cloud top is cooling, it may not be the dominant storm... may not be n the favorable location or on right side of boundary... using any algorithm without paying any attention to the environment is not proper use of the data in forecasting operations... need to combine and/or base the products on environmental information
- The cases this week were slam dunk, so CI was pretty sure to happen... not so useful then
- During May 19 case over OUN... initially watched for CI on southern storms... once one went, they monitored radar... may be useful in detecting first storm of the day
- "Not a lot of meteorologists are gonna have confidence on just one case... need to see more than that"
REGARDING OTTC
- When not looking at discrete supercells, it may be more useful in detecting embedded supercells
- Need to establish (and communicate) better the relationship between OT and severe weather potential
- Erosion of OT would be much more useful than a detection... updraft collapse or weakening... OT magnitude trends would be much more useful
- Difference the cloud-top temp of the overshoot with model temp of level to give an idea of height above EL for instance would be interesting
- Detection not important alone, especially when seeing core aloft on radar... However, where radar coverage sparse, might be more useful (eg. out west)
REGARDING PSEUDO-GLM
- "We definitely did see an increase in lightning rates associated with increases in storm intensity and cores aloft."
- Want to see less smoothing and more texture... just seeing blobs... knocking down max values (we are working on this)
- In the one very marginal case it was saying that the strongest storms were where the radar said they were.
- Concern raised over closeness to network effects... seemed like higher detections over weaker storms... Eric Bruning mentioned that the flash detection should even that out regardless
- "I appreciated having all the lightning rather than just having CG"
- Would like to see how GLM relates to storm intensity... eg. isolated supercells, multi-cells
- "The data makes sense, but what would that mean to me? What does it really tell me?"
- Marginal cases not a good start to understand the data... need training case.
- Eric Bruning mentioned to the forecasters that satellite flash extents may expand due to cloud scattering
REGARDING INTEGRATING SENSOR DATA
- "I think that's the future, stand alone sensors are less important than integrated together."
- "I envision a virtual world of sort... some fast update model that physically builds the storm based on combined data... model updates every time the sensor data updates."
- "What I want is a Star Trek holodeck."
OVERALL COMMENTS
- 2 weeks would be better... essentially we had 3 days of IOP... would be better to have a few full days of training/archive rather than 3 hours and say "go"
- "Having a tool we are used to using is good" (ie - AWIPS)
- Displaying satellite products (CI especially) might be better used as icons that can be overlaid rather than images... size of icon might indicate intensity... images require toggling between two images rather than overlaying
- Might be useful to provide us with WES data prior to arrival so we can go through it before arriving... or maybe a 'gotomeeting' for training the week before arrival
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