EWP daily briefing... The 2345 UTC hour-long satellite gap

At the beginning of the briefing we discussed the previous day's event. Unfortunately due to a few problems we were not able to draw any conclusions from the UWCI or OTTC products from yesterday's event. First, we were not able to display any satellite imagery, so overlaying the UWCI and OTTC products was not possible. Lee Cronce did suggest that we overlay the products on radar towards the middle of the IOP last night, but at this point the second problem came into play... cirrus. During the later half of the IOP the entire region was covered with thin/thick cirrus and thus made the UWCI products inoperable. The OTTC product were still working, but at this point we encountered the hour long void of satellite data from 2345 UTC to 0045 UTC. This hour long void has been causing a lot of trouble during our evening IOPs in the EWP. I have also been hearing complaints from SPC operations as this is a very important time-frame for severe weather and the forecasters don't understand why this time period was selected. Once this occurs we essentially have to shut down the GOES-R aspect of the IOP because the forecasters become disillusioned by the extremely poor temporal resolution of any satellite data during this time period. By the time the satellite data returns, there is no continuity in the products in the forecasters minds and they therefore stick to the radar products they have been comfortable looking at over the past hour. The silver lining from yesterday is that we did see our first thermal couplet detection in real-time last night and it did occur at the time of the issuance of a tornado warning by one of the forecaster groups. In this case it did not provide any lead time, but it did provide confidence in their warning decision.

During the weather briefing I showed the forecasters the NSSL-WRF simulated satellite imagery and lightning threat to help determine the location for tonight's IOP. The forecasters were very interested in the model output and asked to see it every day during the weather briefings. For tomorrow I will also show them the verification page that UW-CIMSS has created for the simulated satellite imagery. We decided to spend the first half of the IOP by splitting the forecasters up into two groups... one participating in a WES case for the PGLM, while the other monitors the location of interest for this evening's IOP for convective initiation. We have decided to localize over Kansas City, MO for the real-time IOP. Updates to follow.