Day 2 at HWT

Although there has been a general lack of wide-spread,exciting, edge-of-your-seat, thunderstorms to warn on this week, forecasters have had plenty of opportunity to play with this year's assortment of experimental weather products. UAHuntsville's convective initiation product, or SATCAST, is sporting it's new "strength of signal" look and functionality. Some successes, watching the development of storms along a frontal boundary stretching through Iowa, UAH SATCAST followed the growing clouds from birth to rain, with values ranging from 20-70 on the strength of signal scale. These clouds went on to produce minimum 35dBZ echoes downstream. Overall, the area did not experience any severe weather, but SATCAST was able to differientiate between the weaker storms and the somewhat stronger storms of the day. (See http://goesrhwt.blogspot.com/2012/05/ci-algorithms-over-iowa.htm for more information). Another success, using SATCAST over the Melbourne, FL warning area, the forecasters report good utility of the strength of signal format indicating the growth of a cloud over subsequent satellite images, one of which resulted in a storm that produced a tornado warning. ( See the post at http://goesrhwt.blogspot.com/2012/05/experimental-warnings-north-of-cape.html). Some not as successful points, working in Roanoke, VA in the early afternoon. Cloud cover and cirrus contamination made using the convective initiation products problematic for the forecasters. (See http://goesrhwt.blogspot.com/2012/05/weak-convection-in-rnk-cwa.html). Although surrounding areas were giving indications of CI, the WFOs remained masked out. Overall, the lack of specific severe weather events monopolizing the time of the forecasters really allowed each of the four participants the time to really dig into the products made available to them this week. One hopes that now that the forecasters are more familiar, the weather will cooperate and give them something a bit more interesting to play with. Time will tell.