EWP: UW-CTC captures early afternoon convection

An unstable and weakly capped atmosphere has resulted in widespread convective development over southern Texas, northern Mexico into southern New Mexico late this morning and early this afternoon.  The UW-CTC product captured the vertical growth of these storms as inferred by the cloud-top cooling rates in the images below.  As was shown yesterday, the UW-CTC rates are providing good lead-time ahead of strong radar reflectivity.  The top panels are the GOES IR-window brightness temperatures (top left) and GOES visible reflectance (top right).  The bottom panels are the UW-CTC rates (bottom left) and El Paso, Texas 0.5 degree reflectivity (bottom right).  Unfortunately the timing of initiation was prior to the start of EWP so these hits have not been extensively evaluated by the forecasters on shift.  Perhaps later development in areas of thin cirrus clouds will provide more examples of the results of including the GOES optical depth retrievals in the UW-CTC algorithm.

 Figure 1. Valid 1715 UTC 08 May 2012.

 Figure 2. Valid 1745 UTC 08 May 2012.

  Figure 3. Valid 1815 UTC 08 May 2012.