Today we spent a couple hours soliciting the forecasters for feedback on all of the products that they worked with this week within the EWP. Given the opportunity, I asked the forecasters some follow-up questions based on some observations this week and from yesterday's event, as well as some of their survey responses. Below are the comments from the discussion...
Convective Initiation
- The CIMSS product had pretty good lead time before we actually started seeing lightning of about 45 minutes to 1 hour, only about 15 minute lead time over 35 dBZ echo.
- Later in the events everything became cloud masked.
- Mostly masked with the CIMSS stuff, but UAH was not and we were expecting CI behind the initial line, but nothing went and there were no CI nowcasts made, so that was very good that we weren't getting false alarms.
- There were times when they would have 30 minute lead-times on radar echos, and other times there were no lead-times during the same event.
- I would like to spend some time looking at those products in more my type of environments, like weak shear.
- A probabilistic approach might be more useful than a simple yes/no output. I like the idea of having pre-CI through CI ongoing information.
- "I tended to look at the UAH one more because it was giving me more detections."
- "I found having the masking overlaid was very important... there were times where the CIMSS wasn't showing something but the UAH was and it helped me get an idea of why."
Overshooting-top / Thermal Couplet
- Later on in the evening we saw some detections, but earlier on we could see some enhanced-v and OT signatures in the imagery, but none were detected.
- If you had someone in operations during warning times that was just doing mesoanalysis and telling forecasters that a detection occurred would be very useful... I get too involved with interrogating radar data during warnings.
- Rapid-scan, high resolution satellite data would definitely make this more useful.
- Would like to see an overshooting top collapse product... maybe an alert.
- Only had a chance to look at the icon detections.
Nearcast
- Saw a moisture tongue coming through, but nothing happened.
- Focused primarily on theta-e product, trying to figure out best way to use that... the challenge the day before was that nothing happened, so it's hard to find the values that are more significant... didn't notice any strong signals yesterday, so I didn't really use it.
- Were not able to get the multiple levels in AWIPS... would like to see those.
- "My initial thoughts were that this was no different than looking at the RUC theta-e product... but I do understand that it was nice to have it based on the observations."
- Would definitely like to see this in my home WFO.
Pseudo-GLM
- What could be really useful for forecasters is some training on total lightning activity and how it relates to what's going on within storms.
- Specific numbers for what an intense flash rate is would be helpful.
- We're fairly comfortable with looking at CG activity and what that means, but an IC/CG ratio product would be useful.
- You can get a sense for the trends, especially when significant, but there's a lot of complexity when looking at the entire storm with some areas decreasing and increasing rapidly within the same cell. Maybe if you could interrogate the storm and get a graph of the total lightning activity.
- We have a lot of users like golf courses and parks that we may not be paying attention to, especially for lightning safety in stratoform rain regions where people may think that it's just light rain. When I'm in warning operations, I get engaged in the base radar data and pay less attention to everything else. This may help a lot in those situations.
Overall
- If we had it set up that one person was in charge of the warnings and looking at the radar data, then the other person could focused on a couple of the experimental products if you're working in pairs at the same desk. If the other desk could do the same thing with a couple of the other experimental products, we might be able to get more useful information on everything.
- "Maybe if we had a couple hours each day to just focus on one product, so all of the fields in the product could be examined. I know I set up a real quick procedure on the first day and only got to look at a couple of the fields and felt like I left the rest behind."
- "I'm wondering if a 2-week period would be better for each forecaster... the first week could be used to get comfortable with all of the products and then the second week we could really get into the products in warning operations." (Difficult to get a forecaster away from their office for 2-weeks... especially in May.)
- If forecasters had a week or two to go through articulate presentations prior to arriving that would help us hit the ground running on the first day and avoid powerpoint death. Make it a prerequisite then have a short discussion with the PIs on what they want to focus on during the first day and go into short DRTs for each product.
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