UAH CI Product Achieves 1.5 hour Lead Time in Tropical Florida Environment

One of the places in which the old version of the UAH SATCAST CI product used to suffer was in the tropical environment of the Gulf Coast with relatively low PODs and shorter lead-times.  Shown below is an example of an output CI forecast that was able to produce a lead time of 1.5 hours over radar (Figures 1 and 2).

Several improvements have been made to the algorithm since its debut as a "cloud object tracking CI product" 2 years ago (Spring 2010). With a newly defined future path as a "doubly data fused" algorithm (using short-term NWP environmental forecasts as input --and-- CI forecast output as NWP assimilated input), the best way to gauge performance is to make sure we are thoroughly bench-marking and improving its accuracy and usefulness as a Decision Support System (DSS).  Otherwise, using it as input into NWP models will prove much less effective. 

Figure 1.  SATCAST Strength of Signal CI product produces forecast output of 70+ index value (on scale from 0-100), valid from 1315 UTC (Left).  The storm motion is to the ENE.  Note the lack of any radar echoes at the time (Right).

Figure 2.  By 1445 UTC (1.5 hours after the above CI forecast in Figure 1), the first 35+ dBZ echo is finally detected by the radar (Right).