Potentially missed CI target... but with a silver lining

As we have seen over the past couple years during the Spring Experiment, the bane of the satellite community's existence has struck again. It's 2100 UTC and that means we have another 30 minute gap in satellite data right during initiation period... so any updates in the imagery and the CI products will have to wait until after 2115 UTC, and our last image was at 2045 UTC. During that period the cirrus is likely to move over the area, inhibiting any of the CI products from detecting the clouds underneath... We will continue to monitor the area, however it seems like we may have just missed our target.

However, there is a silver lining to this event. Forecasters have been watching the CI products constantly over the past couple hours and have noticed no false alarms over the area of developing cu field for either of the CI products. There were a few false alarms with the cirrus overrunning the surface causing false cooling with the UWCI, as well as a couple false alarms with some of the stratus area in eastern CO with the SATCAST (UAH CI) product. The forecasters mentioned that the fact that these CI products were showing no signals over the cu field of interest provided them with increased confidence that CI was NOT occurring. Increased confidence is a good thing, whether it leads to exciting weather or not.