Apologies for some lost posts on the blog and the lack of posts since Thursday morning. The Blogspot server went down and we couldn't access it until sometime this weekend. We will be working on restoring some interesting posts about PGLM and SATCAST that got lost. In the meantime, here is a transcript of what we discussed with the EWP forecasters during the end of week debrief...
UWCI / OTTC
- Was not coming in correctly all week, so was not demonstrated within AWIPS.
- Forecasters were not comfortable offering further comments based solely on informal demonstrations with visiting PI since they were not able to use the products within AWIPS.
SATCAST
- I think that does have some utility, but I think the way that it is a yes/no solution doesn’t work. It clearly wasn’t in a position to be used in an operational state with just a yes/no. From visible satellite you can clearly see that there are Cu in the area, but if you have multiple colors for different features of CI it might be very useful.
- From the standpoint of just having more data to compliment the process, I think it would be very useful.
- Looking at “areas” where CI was going to occur versus individual cells was much more useful to me. From the training I was expecting to see individual cells and when I used it I saw way too many false alarms, but once I switch the way I looked at it, it became much more useful.
- When it stayed red, it gave much more confidence than flickering on and off red.
- Having 6 thresholds may have been detrimental because it caused the flickering. Perhaps having some intermediate CI nowcasts would be useful to add.
- I think its strength is going to be its spatial and temporal resolution.
- I think its greatest utility would be in weakly sheared environments… 100’s of Cu over the area and this would help pick out which ones to pay attention to.
- Day/night switch triggered many more false alarms.
- “I think you’re on the right track with what you are doing.”
NEARCAST
- After the training, the forecasters felt comfortable understanding the product and how to use it.
- Color curves seemed to be reversed from NAWIPS/web versus AWIPS, and were confusing, but they worked through it.
- “You can infer convective instability 100 different ways.” … Forecaster was still confused as to how this was showing much more information.
- It is definitely best in the 1-2 hr timeframe, but anywhere outside of that it gets hard to use.
- At one point data did not arrive between 16-21 UTC, made fairly hard to use.
- Issue of clouds… later on in the day there were so many blacked out areas so we couldn’t really see what was happening.
PGLM
- Used the second “jump” as a situational awareness tool and decided to warn on it and it ended up having severe hail (5/12 – Norman). This preceded any radar indicators by 1-2 volume scans.
- I thought it was a good head’s up tool… going into it I didn’t know what to expect, but it ended up getting the storms that had severe just before radar. It was a very good situational awareness tool.
- It did seem that there was a lot more IC than CG yesterday (5/12 - Norman). The CGs were not a good delineator of severe vs. non-severe.
- I would like to see a WES case before getting immersed in the data.
- I definitely saw IC first and then CG, so it definitely provided me with a good heads up tool.
- The 1-minute data was really useful… That was enough resolution for me… 20-30 seconds may be too much. I especially preferred the instantaneous data… I wasn’t really interested in what happened in the past so I didn’t use the max density much.
- An IC-CG ratio product would be very useful.
- “A time-series would be awesome. If I want to interrogate individual cells, I want to dig into it.” … This is in conflict with the overall forecaster feedback last year (and some this year), who did not like the idea… General consensus was that if was not within AWIPS it would not be used… May be something to bring into AWIPS-II
- I don’t know what these values mean yet… If I was to take this back today, I couldn’t even explain what this does. I think you need to explain what a certain value is showing us, otherwise I think you will have a hard time selling this to forecasters.
- Fire weather in the west is obviously a big thing that the PGLM data can help fill the holes by radar and NLDN. There won’t be as much surprise by lightning starts.
OVERALL
- You have to get a large enough group of forecasters comfortable with these products who will go out and spread the word and the spread will become viral.
- “I didn’t find the integration with the CI group helpful, I actually felt more confused with the forecast by going over there. When we come in they have already chosen their domain and I’m not sure how much we can provide to them. The whole time I wanted to go to AWIPS and look at what’s going on. The concept was good, but their mission was different than what we were doing. I could see it being useful for us if we had some time to look at the data and then go over and ask them what they are seeing.”
- Maybe if the morning shift came in at 10 or 11 it might be more useful… The forecasters didn’t seem to find the idea of coming in early useful to adding information for the evening shift.
- Forecasters did not find the large briefing with the EFP useful. It seemed like everyone in the EFP was still working within their own “stovepipe” and that they were just an audience and not participating much.
- Surveys were designed very well and not tedious… having one survey for all products was a great idea.
- Having the PIs around was very helpful because they could ask questions and continue to use the products.
- At the beginning they felt that there were too many projects, but as the week moved on and the PIs sat down and worked with them, it wasn’t too much to handle.
- A WES case at the beginning of the week with all products would help with the exposure to each of the products at least once.
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