EWP daily briefing... 6/9/2010

Before the official briefing started, one of the forecasters mentioned to Lee Cronce and myself the idea of creating a filter for the CI product where cirrus is present so that the forecasters will know when the product will not be able to make any nowcasts, similar to how the radars have a certain color for areas where range folding is occurring. He mentioned that at some times they cannot understand why the product is not producing nowcasts in obvious situations of CI unless someone looks up the cloud type output for them. This was noted by Lee as a possibility for future input into the product's output.


24-hour thermal couplet detections and severe reports for 7 June 2010
During the briefing Lee presented some scan by scan output from the UWCI product over Wyoming during the 6/7 IOP. He mentioned that the first signal in the UWCI was seen at 2032 UTC, with more widespread signals occurring at 2045 UTC and beyond. The area of interest was actually located between two radars where coverage is fairly limited and the UWCI provided some information on the initiation about 15 minutes prior to detection on radar. He also showed the 24-hour thermal couplet detections and severe reports from the same event (see images above). There were a lot of detections associated with the severe reports, including one that was co-located with and prior to a report of a tornado near Scottsbluff, NE.

One of the forecasters mentioned the possibility of a GOES-R storm top divergence product. He mentioned how this would be very useful in determining storm characteristics in warning operations. I mentioned Bob Rabin's work with current GOES WV winds in producing real-time winds at various levels by tracking features in the WV imagery. From these winds he is able to calculate divergence, vorticity and wind speed contours. I showed them real-time examples from the website provided by Bob Rabin at http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/mesoscale_winds/. The forecasters seemed very interested in this and mentioned interest in demonstrating this in future experiments. I also made sure to point out that with GOES-R's great improvement on spatial and temporal resolution, these products will be much more accurate and will be able to capture smaller scale features. I also talked about GOES-R's increased capability for object tracking.

During the weather discussion I showed the forecasters the UW-CIMSS simulated satellite/observed satellite comparison page to see how well the NSSL-WRF was representing the day's weather. It seemed to be doing fairly well so I showed the simulated lightning threat product to see what the NSSL-WRF was showing for the possibility of lightning over the CONUS region. There seemed to be the possibility of some lightning occurring over the Nashville area later on this evening, so following the weather discussion for the day we decided to localize near Huntsville, AL for the possibility of real-time PGLM operations.