Daily Summary: Week 3, Day 2 (May 20th, 2014)

What some people (including me) called a marginal day last night were pleasantly surprised with the amount and extent of convection observed in all CWAs utilized today. For a majority of the day we operated in the Cheyenne, WY and Quad Cities, IA/IL CWAs (CYS and DVN). As a supercell fired east of Denver, CO (BOU) forecasters leveraged this opportunity to look at the lightning jump detection algorithm and track total lightning on the tornado warned storm. In the late afternoon as the storms in the CYS area weakened, we shifted our product evaluation to Chicago, IL (LOT) for a DVN/LOT side-by-side warning operations session.

By splitting our operations into West vs. East, we were able to take advantage of (and blog about) almost all products brought into the experiment…with the exception of OUNWRF (sorry Gabe :( ). The tracking meteogram was put to the test again today with  forecasters wanting to track multiple product types simultaneously (radar + MR/MS, etc.) with mixed results. All forecasters issued their fair share of warnings (especially Danielle!) this afternoon. The training storms in the DVN region provided quite the challenge and convection is firing like crazy in LOT right now. I think it will be hard to pull the forecasters away from their computers tonight.

Feedback (BL)

Simulated Satellite Imagery:
- It matched pretty well in the morning, and continued throyughout the forecast
- I really liked it (WV) it captured SW and speed max in KANSAS. This gave me confidence that later in the day the speed max would be good.
- Boudnaries were setting up correctly, off by about a county, gave me a few that this was an area to look at

NearCast

- Wonderful. For all three systems. It will be helpful for inititiation

- In boulder, theta-e stream feeding storm

- In Chicago, convection developed along the northern gradient. As soon as cu hit the boundary, storms went up

- Looked at pw and theat-e products. I had to do some interpolating where data was unavailable which was fine. 

- I liked around 18z, there was a nice cu field in Kansas to Wyoming, that is where highest instability was, and where deepest moisture was.

- Color bar took sonme getting getting used to, but I was able to easily calibrate. 

- All really liked the wide spectrum of colors so it would easily show gradients. 

GOES-R CI

- Mixed results in Chicago area. Highlighted boundary where we had towering cu. Wide variety of values, from 10 to 80, but whole boundary went.

- Mixed feelings. Initially you can see thin line of cu firing across northern iowa. I don’t think the ci product captured that development. Highest value was maybe 40%> there was a 70 further south, nothing developed

Prob Severe

- I liked prob severe, it was pretty on point with targeting big storms that formed, looking at trends was helpful. They started low then amped up so I warned.
- Initially a little hesitant about the product. But by end of shift was really confident in it because it was doing really well.
- It drew the eye to the storm (good color scale).
- In chicago area,, to the south, storms were growing and splitting. Typically you pay attention to right split. Both storms actually had high values. You wouldn’t normally think this one would have as high a prob, this product made you want to look at it. The left split did have a severe hail report
- It didn’t work as well out in Wyoming. Storms were marginally severe (occasional quarter) probs were always low (below 50). On front range
- Im colorblind, so I changed colors. The gradients weren’t good for me. I changed it to – anything below 50 was black, then blocks of color every 10 to 100.
- For convective maintenance it was helpful. When the probs went down, the hail sizes reports went down.

OTD
- Chicago storm that had big hail had an OT. Several others had OTs but did not meet criteria of algorithm, the one that met criteria was longest lasting with biggest hail. Consistant detection. Certainly highlighted biggest storm

Tracking Tool
- I had mixed results with this. i tracked base velocity. The meteograms started to multiply so I stopped
- With boulder storm, I looked at composite reflectivity, all the panes locked up.
- I had major issues. It was great initially. But trying to load with dual pole (many panes) too m,any graphs. Switched to reflectibity and velocity, tab went blank. Reloaded, time with velocity did not match reflectibity. Velocity would update, reflecitivity did not. Red banner kept po[ping up, loading error. But I think it whas potential

-Darrel Kingfield
EWP Week 3 Coordinator