EWP daily debrief 6/12

Today we had the opportunity to debrief our final group of forecasters for the first time this week.  Most of yesterday was spent familiarizing the forecasters with the products in AWIPS II.  Below are some comments gathered during today's debrief...

SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "In Tulsa's area, SATCAST strength of signal was always under 40 or so... at one point it did start to develop a consolidated area just south of I-40 where it was an area that was associated with some enhanced low-level moisture convergence... nothing really happened, but it was still interesting to see the evolution.  The values were still low, so I wasn't really expecting much to happen... it was nice to be able to have some confidence that CI might not occur."
- "We had a little bit down in Birmingham's area and we did see some strength of signals reaching 80 and those did develop and some became severe, so it did a nice job."
- "We had a couple CTCs reach near -20 C / 15 min and we did see a cold pool coming down, so we did go ahead and trigger a warning on it... The one tower that cooled the most was the one that went up the fastest and was associated with some high winds later on."
- "Some of those that were to the north of HUN's area did have some significant CTCs but nothing happened... there were only a couple of these... it seemed like the FAR was pretty low."

Nearcast
- "It was telling us that the axis of instability was going all the way to the coast (and it did) and that would be a huge thing to know, whether the convection would continue or die."
- "In the Tulsa domain, looking at the low level PW and theta-e, it was really showing the drying coming down.... the surface obs saw this too, but it was still interesting to see that and how it affected the convection."

PGLM
- "We saw some increases in lightning activity, but I wouldn't say it became an indicator one way or the other... but we were dealing with an ongoing MCS, so there may not have been many changes going on... it did not sway us in our warning decision."
- "There wasn't much lead time on the occurrence of CGs... they seemed to happen at the same time of the ICs... but again, we were dealing with an MCS."
- "At a CWSU, if I had this data everywhere it would be huge because you may not have any 'ground truth' from CG data with storms that may still have tops up to 32k ft and producing IC flashes that you don't want any planes flying into."
- "It was nice because you can't really see any sort of jumps in lightning from CG data alone."
- "We did have two 60 mph wind reports near Mussel Shoals that were associated with some increases in lightning activity."