Daily Debrief: 5/15/13

Yesterday turned out to be the best day of the experiment thus far! Later in the evening we saw rapid convective initiation in Southern OK and Northern TX. Supercells formed just west of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and produced very large hail as well as a series of strong tornadoes in the area. Check out the image below of the pair of supercells just west of DFW. Tornados from these cells caused a lot of damage in Cleburne and Granbury.

051513 0036 UTC Reflectivity (top left), Velocity (top right), CC (bottom left), and TDS (bottom right)

A lot of blog posts and feedback were collected from this event on the various experimental products. Here are some of the comments noted in this morning's debriefing:

PGLM
- 'I noticed a correlation between the MESH and the lightning data. Several minutes after there was a big jump in flashes, there was also a big jump in MESH values.'
- 'The OUN network kept losing sensors so it was hard to know what was a jump and what was data loss. It would be helpful to have the status information so we know that we've actually lost sensors and and when we've got a jump.'
- 'In my opinion forecasters won't like that you have [use the lightning moving trace tool] manually.'
- 'In real time I can see [the moving trace tool] being a little clunky to use, a little labor intensive, but for analysis of an event it would be awesome to see that trending information.'
- 'It would helpful to see the lightning data plotted with the hail/MESH information.'
- 'We didn't hardly get any lightning with the Oklahoma bow echo... perhaps this could be an indicator that it wasn't going to be as strong of an MCS.'
- 'I paid attention to the lightning cores and where it was increasing significantly. This seemed to be a good indication of a strong storm.'

GOES-R CI
- 'There were a couple of times where the CI gave us an 80/90% value that developed/initiated into a deep convective core.'
- 'Values were overall low yesterday in TX, but where it pinpointed the higher values it did a good job of indicating strong initiation.'
- 'I thought it did extremely well. We were looking at a decent sized cu field and it seemed to pinpoint on specific cu very well.'
- 'Yesterday there was enough of a difference in the CI values where you could pick out the more significant initiation, but on other days it seems to be far more confetti-like.'
- 'THe Montague storm had a CI value of 60%. An hour later it initiated. Thirty minutes later we had baseball sized hail. Fifteen minutes after that we had a strong tornado.'
- 'It seemed to do well with the clusters of strong updrafts, but had trouble in higher terrain. This may be an elevation/snow effect.'

CTC
- We had good CTC rates on a number of storms that ended up falling apart. It ended up that the storms had good initiation but were moving into an environment not conducive to further growth.'
- 'The CTC did a good job yesterday, but it's still very important to know your environment. We saw strong signals, but not all initiated because of other environmental factors not seen in the CTC.'
- 'The CTC gave consistent lead time of at least 20-30 minutes for severe storms on multiple occasions [in Texas].'

Our last day of operations this week doesn't look to be nearly as exciting as yesterday. We're currently in the Goodland, KS, and North Platte, NE CWA's where things have already began to initiate, and may move further south later in the evening. Stayed tuned for further updates as the day progresses...