EWP daily debrief 6/13

We had a good severe weather day yesterday and was able to capture some feedback today on how things went...

SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "The stuff over the mountains had a lot of false alarms in both CI products."
- "We were seeing the occurrence of 35 DBZ at mid levels about 30 minutes after we saw cooling rates of -20 C / 15 mins or higher."
- "The survey questions for the CTC were implying that I should be using it for warning decision making, but it became problematic once storms became mature and there was increased cloud cover."
- "If the CTC got over -20 C / 15 mins anywhere other than over the terrain yesterday, there were really no false alarms...  I did do one warning solely on the CTC, but it was on the terrain and never really did anything."
- "There was one supercell going to the Clovis radar late in the day yesterday, at one point the CTC peaked a bit at -16 C / 15 min... within 30 minutes that thing had MESH of 3.5"... then it turned right and had some big hail stones... that was a very interesting case where it identified some additional strengthening of storms."
- "We were halfway through making the polygon and we saw a new CTC signal and that pretty much made us continue to issue the warning."
- "You have to weigh the environment too."
- "That product (CTC) can certainly help raise your awareness of strengthening storms."
- "I noticed that there was no CTC signals and then there was one where it got way up there at -31 C / 15 mins and then it went away again... it did turn out to be a very severe storm, but I would have liked to see some sort of continuity to increase my confidence."
- "It seemed that there was a 15-20 minute lead time on seeing the CTC and the storm really intensifying."
- "It seems like you could remove the lower strength of signal in the SATCAST... it gets a bit noisy... maybe anything below 40."
- "Once the storms got off the terrain, the SATCAST strength of signals above 70 would definitely initiate."

Nearcast
- "We saw in both the CAPE and theta-e difference that the values would just blank out with time... we were on the edge of both the GOES-E and GOES-W boundaries."
- There was some discussion about the need to preserve information from both GOES-W and GOES-E, especially over these boundaries in the mountains and high plains.  The forecasters agreed that a merged GOES-W and GOES-E product would be very beneficial.

Overall
- "From an aviation perspective, if I can know an hour or two hours in advance where and when CI will occur, that is incredibly important.  If I can have some strong confidence in that, it would be huge."
- "Having something between watch issuance time and warning time would be incredibly useful in being able to narrow down which areas will go first."