EFP week 3 begins...

Today begins a new week of Spring Experiment activities within the HWT. There were no operations on Monday, hence the lack of posting. Also, the EWP is not operating due to the short week, so there will be a heavier interaction within the EFP this week. This week's visitors include Bill McCaul from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Dan Hartung and Chris Rozoff from UW-CIMSS. We will be focusing more on the simulated lightning threat and satellite imagery from the NSSL-WRF this week as those products are more relevant to EFP operations. Given the opportunity, we will also be evaluating the convective initiation and overshooting top / thermal couplet detection products during the afternoon time frames.

Today's focus for the severe and QPF groups in a mesoscale area centered over Omaha, NE. Bill McCaul and Chris Rozoff will be participating in the aviation group today who are focused on an area covering much of the eastern half of the US. Dan Hartung will be working with the QPF group today. The groups will rotate throughout the week. We are already utilizing the CTC product in the aviation group to highlight areas on satellite imagery of future convective development. We have talked about how the current satellite provides some limitations in detection due to the coarse resolution of the IR channels. Steve Silberberg from the Aviation Weather Center (AWC) discussed with Chris Rozoff and I about the possibilities of providing these products at the AWC and I told him we would be happy to help them getting the data into their NAWIPS systems since we have much experience doing this at the SPC.

The simulated satellite imagery was examined by the QPF group, comparing it to actual satellite imagery from the same time. We were able to determine that the NSSL-WRF was showing a good ability at capturing larger scale features such as short-waves and jet streaks. The smaller, more convective scale features were slightly misplaced, especially over the KS/NE area. We discussed the future of our efforts with the simulated model imagery, including providing more model runs and producing GOES-R-like products from the simulated imagery, such as band differences.