Daily Summary: Week 4, Day 1 (June 1, 2015)

After a week off, the EWP Spring Warning Project resumed in the Hazardous Weather Testbed. With much of the first 3 weeks of activities taking place in Texas, it is refreshing to have a change in the weather pattern, taking us north this week. Today, we had our 3 pairs of forecasters operate in the Bismarck, Pocatello, and Pendleton CWA’s. It is beneficial to have the algorithms evaluated in a variety geographic regions, so today’s northwest convection was welcomed. With a slow start to convection, participants had ample opportunity to become familiar with all of the GOES-R and ENTL products under evaluation. By the end of the day, as convective activity amped up, participants were comfortable using the products to issue short-term forecasts and warnings.

Tomorrow’s activities will begin at 1 pm, and will likely make a slight shift eastward with the most active convective weather.

– Bill Line, SPC/HWT Satellite Liaison and Week 4 EWP Coordinator

Forecaster comments from debrief:

GOES-R LAP products
- It was useful in the pre storm environment, looking for most likely areas for convection to fire.
- It was a nice SA display.
- At first there weren’t much in terms of trends, convection didn’t go till late, we did notice one area in ND Montana border that was persistent with instability, that’s where we focused,
- It showed LL PW increasing, southerly flow advecting moisture.
- I liked having the 3 layers of moisture, especially being out west

NUCAPS
- Looked at 19z pass, mid afternoon, sampled clear areas in east Pocatello, confirmed elevated convection. PW fairly low. Good representation of current state of atmosphere
- Give you a general idea of how the atmosphere has evolved  since the morning.
- Edited for sfc temp and dp, gave us pretty good cape,
- Color code dots to highlight good/bad profiles (QC)

GOES-R CI
- Never got high probabilities in Bismarck. When you looped you could kind of see a trend. There was a lot of cirrus so that could have led to some contamination. So we weren’t too thrilled with it.
- In Pocatello, you saw increasing probs on leading edge of convection, and that's where stuff developed, did good job of indicating development
- I was impressed with how well the ci product was able to pick out individual cloud elements, and track those.
- We had convection ongoing when we sat down, but looking at ci further west, and had values that helped.

- Convection east of Bismark developed and had no ci at all

ProbSevere
- One we warned on, it went from nothing to 90% within a few scans, really good indicator that storm was strengthening fast
- Couldn’t get long lead time, it was good to look at to draw attention to strongest cells
- One convo we had, in typical short lived multi cell events ~ usually issue for 30ish minutes. Using prob severe, you should go out longer with warning cause you are getting more lead time. After first warning, we wrote longer
- Good in triage situation, with lot of cells on radar, in picking out the most noteworthy ones.
- Would be good to use in southeast for popcorn convection, when you have little time to make decision, prob severe could increase lead time and pinpoint storms
- Yesterday, popcorn convection in Bismark, very low probs, but drew us to the storms
- Case where there was a tbss showed up same time probsevere jumped over 50%, having probsevere match with this gave extra confidence that something else was showing this too.
- Unobtrusive display, easy to read, easy to put on combo rotate, doesn’t take away form viewing other data
- I like the sampling associated with cursor readout
- Weren’t getting glaciation because of cirrus deck
- Were using mesh from readout to decide what size hail to go with. Nice having it there in display

SRSOR
- Using super rapid scan, could see bubbling
- Loved it, cause you could see the cells bubbling up, it was smooth and continuous, rather than 15 or 5 min imagery
- Looking at cu fields evolving quickly, prepares you for what to see on radar
- From broadcaster perspective, waiting 15 min for vis sat to update, if we were to have 1-min updates, to be able to pick out where cu field is bubbling up more, is something we’d absolutely love to see and use
- Easier to see the trends.
- If you can see the way things are evolving before they evolve, before issuing warnings, could increase lead time to calling someone in, or holding someone over
- Last week in my office, one of the guys said this is probably the first time I used sat in warning ops, and it was great … davenport
- Especially out west, we have radar void areas. Seeing this, seeing it evolve and live, that catches your eye.
- Already being used in real life warning ops
- Not just weather porn, it is actually useful
- Sea breeze fronts
- Extremely important for fire weather, picking up fires.
- Out west, lots of dust storms, seeing that come

- We could see this being useful every day, in many situations

Lightning jump
- Using base data and DP, we had a good idea for storm, looking at it after the fact it agreed. Definitely a confidence booster.
- We used it quite a bit, to help direct us to the strongest storms, interesting to compare lightning jump to probsevere... some cases where lj jumped, and probsevere after, and opposite
- Display with different sigma, I don’t see what point of showing dark objects with -999
- 11 sigma jump with smaller scale, nothing with smaller scale
- In SC, would be good during summer for SVS