Well it's halfway through the experiment and we once again got a chance to sit down with the forecasters and pick their brains about their experience over the past week. We got a lot of really good blog posts this week from the forecasters, but we wanted to ask them some more product specific questions. Below is the feedback we captured...
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- Forecasters asked if they could get the CI products via LDM... we said yes, but they will have to ask the regions to get it. UAH CI is already being delivered to southern region, UWCI is also available via LDM to a few regions... both products are also available on the web (see this blog post).
- Is this product still useful in pulse type non-severe storms? "Yes, absolutely... as long as there is no cirrus contaminating."
- "The probabilistic CI will be really useful for aviation purposes since we're not looking at just severe convection."
- "There were some times when using both products at the same time became confusing because the CI would show low probabilities, but the CTC would show some strong signals." ... This is an effect of the products being completely independent of each other.
- "I definitely think running both together provides the most information for us... my biggest observation was that when the CI switched to night time mode, maybe put a threshold on the lower signals to cut out on some of the amount of signals."
- "There were some good cases where the CI would switch from 60% to 80% and then the CTC would flag the storm and we would get some good lead time on the first lightning strike... it was nice to have it all work in tandem."
- "Every storm that went severe yesterday in MO had a -30 C/15 min and every signal that strong lead to a severe storm, so it was a complete success."
- "I did play around with the color table to make it look more like radar and used it a bit, but realized that I didn't really like it... the standard color table worked really well."
Nearcast
- "That was my favorite product... it really seemed to capture the motion of the atmosphere than any of the products we had been looking at."
- "I really liked the 500 mb theta-e product... it really had a clear picture of the gradient of moisture and showed a strong push of cooler/dryer air where storms did not end up forming."
- "It really picked up on an area SE of Denver where the instability was strongest and identified the region where storms formed."
- "It seems like the colors were a little flipped, with the more unstable being the cooler colors... as a forecaster I want to see the warmer colors identify regions I should be paying attention to... red means bad in our field."
- "I'm wondering what this is going to look like in the west when the levels aren't as applicable... are they thinking about adding more levels?" ... Yes
Simulated Satellite
- "The simulated satellite picked up on some of the isolated storms pretty well all week, but the more organized things like cold fronts or the tropical system did not do so well." ... This is more of an issue of the model, not the simulated satellite imagery itself and seems to be a feature of this week only... may be due to the fact that there was some significant capping over much of the US.
- What did you think of using this versus other model fields? "It's really useful, we have to do sky fields in GFE and it would be very helpful to get this in GFE." ... Dan Lindsey volunteered to do this and was given a contact to do so.
- "The low bias in extent of high/anvil clouds was very apparent... is there any effort to fix that, but still keep the ability to keep low cloud info from the model? I think it might be useful to have two separate products, one for the regular imagery and one for low clouds."
- "If you could code the low clouds generated in a IFR, VFR, MIFR, MVFR color table, that would be incredibly useful for aviation." ... This may be more of a suggestion for the low cloud/fog product.
- "It would be nice to have more model runs of this." ... It would be hard to do so because of the computational requirements.
- We mentioned to the forecasters that this product is available via LDM and the forecasters were encouraged to contact Dan Lindsey to get the process started... it is also available on the web (see this blog post).
- "We did notice that the simulated WV was much dryer than the observed." ... This is because the band being simulated is different than the one that is available on current GOES and sees slightly lower in the atmosphere.
- "I stumbled on the band difference and I basically said, 'I don't know what this stuff is' so I backed off." ... This suggests more work needs to be done with forecasters on basic satellite topics like band differences, weighting functions and radiative transfer... a short description was understood very well, so it's not a complexity issue, it's more of a lack of required training.
- "I was using the band difference yesterday to pick out the dry line over much of OK... it was a little difficult to see because of the low clouds over the area."
Sounder Airmass
- "I looked at it twice... it was interesting to see the initiation occurred along the sharp moisture gradients that were associated with the strong shortwave troughs... as well as being very useful for picking out the jet maximum... I really love this product."
PGLM
- Unfortunately another miss this week... no significant weather within range of the LMAs.
Overall / Training
- "When stuff begins firing... I switch away from the models."
- "Any extra lead time you can give on training materials is beneficial... It can be difficult to try and weave that in to your operational shift schedule... It did take more than one day to get through all the material... I had to go through some of the material twice before I got a real grasp on it."
- "The WES was very useful to just play around with the data... the job sheets were helpful, but I just liked playing around with the data."
- "If we came in the first day and tried to cover all this material I would have been totally overwhelmed."
- "Can you condense the presentations? Get right to the point and be concise... you can provide additional written background material that we can go over later."
- "Keeping stuff off a required NOAA domain would help so I could access it at home."
- "I found that I was spending a lot of time the first two days just trying to find the products... anything you can do to have procedures ready would be very helpful." ... This is difficult since we localize over anywhere in the US, so procedures built for one localization will not work for another.
- "If you can be more upfront and tell us 'You should be looking at this product now' would help us not miss things we should be seeing... don't be afraid to interrupt us." ... Maybe have the PIs running a separate workstation and have their displays up on the Situational Awareness Display would help.
No comments:
Post a Comment