Daily Debrief: 5/20/13 and 5/21/13

With Monday being the "spin up" day and Tuesday a late shift where the Convective Initiation and Cloud-Top Cooling products were not utilized since convection was ongoing, only a few of the GOES-R products had utility in Tuesday's operations. We were hoping for better CI chances the next two days but now with GOES-13 out...the NearCast, CI, and CTC products will not be available until 23 May 2013 around 6Z at the earliest. Here are the highlights of the last two days...

NearCast

The GOES-R NearCast Thte-E trends and instability fields were good.

The NearCast instability products showed that instability was really increasing ahead of the southern Mississippi Valley line between 00-06Z last night...which suggested a prolonged event. The squall line kept going through the southeast and wind damage ended up occurring into central MS.


Convective Initiation

The Convective Initiation product picked up on intiiation potential in between the clusters...higher probabilities.

It appears that the CI product had limited false detections...low probabilities did not tend to develop into 35 dBZ echoes.

The CI product would be helpful when there are outdoor events going on that you are monitoring.

On Monday, the CI product gave a good indication of developing convection along the TX portion of the dryline after storms initiated in OK.


WRF Simulated Forecasts

The simulated IR forecasts showed good  accuracy in the two lines of convection...overall pretty good. 

I felt the IR forecasts were impressive...there was a single line of convection with good placement and it was remarkably similar to what was going on. This was using a 23-h fcst. 


Cloud-Top Cooling

Early on Monday, the Wichita Falls, TX storm had a strong CTC signal and that storm went on to produce baseballs.

It will be interesting to see how the CTC product will work for situational awareness for pulse severe situations.


PGLM

I used the PGLM moving trace tool for situational awareness on a few storms. Maybe during the heat of major outbreak it would take too much time to use...but this remains to be seen.

It does get difficult to assess more than one storm using the moving trace tool.