Nearcast in a warning environment

EWP forecasters are currently monitoring severe weather over southern TX and issuing experimental warnings for storms that have been producing severe hail.  One of the forecaster groups localized for the forecast office in Austin, TX has been monitoring GOES-13 IR with the UW-CIMSS differential theta-e product overlaid.  Their goal is to identify the near-storm environment that the currently severe storm is moving into to aid in the warning decision making process.  This provided a very good example how the Nearcast product maintains previous observations where new observations cannot be made due to cloud cover.  This can be useful in providing high-resolution observational data key to identifying localized regions of instability that cannot be obtained through other means.  In this case the forecasters decided to issue an experimental severe thunderstorm warning at 2228 UTC based on the current representation of the storm on radar and the Nearcast differential theta-e fields.