Daily Summary: Week 4, Day 3 (June 3, 2015)

Today’s activities took us to Cheyenne, Boulder, and Jacksonville, with the Cheyenne group moving to Topeka before ending in Dodge City. The PGLM total lightning Flash Extent Density within the Colorado LMA in NE Colorado saw heavy use with storms that developed in the Boulder CWA. It was nice to have a group operate in the Jacksonville today as it allows us to demonstrate the tools in a different region of the US. This is important considering most of the experiment has been spent west of the Mississippi River thus far. This group, however, did not have access to the 1-min imagery, something they missed dearly! The Boulder group found it helpful to monitor the LAP PWAT products as  moisture quickly approached the front range from the east, tightening the moisture gradient leading up to convective initiation. The approaching feature was also apparent in the 1-min imagery. The NUCAPS, CI, ProbSevere and ENI Lightning products all saw use throughout the day as well.

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

Forecast comments from daily debrief:

GOES-R LAP
- Higher pwats bulging into foothills was helpful, you could see moisture coming in
- Cape vaues, as clouds thinned, could see cu increasing there
- Comparing to everything else I have, compare to rap meso, etc. get a good quick check. Meso seems to be following it
- Broad environmental analysis
- Would be cool to use a first guess form other models too
- In southeast was useful yesterday, northern part of cwa had higher moisture, cape, etc.
- Later in the day it was confusing
- Initial convection that died went up before gradient tightened. Later stuff was when gradient was tightened

NUCAPS
- Waiting for cap to break. Had 18z special sounding, looked at nucaps, you could see that it wasn’t far from breaking. Could see a sign of a capping in uncaps. Location in nucaps of feature was close to that on the sounding.

- In Cheyenne area, showed high cape,

GOES-R CI
- In southeast, it showed development pretty well
- Ci not my favorite product, yesterday, there was so many areas, with many different colors, a lot going on, I couldn’t focus on one area over another.
- There was an area that was 94, couldn’t tell if that was the one that developed.
- Ci was great for 5-15 , but when you have 1-min imagery, you can really see stuff happening.
- Might be nice to see values like probsevere.

- Set below 40 to black, didn’t single with 3 main cells. Cloud cover that was there might have squashed it. Would use it with main convection, after that, losing utility

ProbSevere
- It showed that the storms we had weren’t going to do much. Low end stuff. Anticipating when is core going to go up. But probs stayed low. So it nailed that.
- I liked using it with the eni time-series, because both of them increase my confidence whether I will issue a warning., both will show me fav signals, my confidence would be higher
- Case yesterday, all products were going up simultaneously, gives you confidence in the storm.
- Not too much information with lightning
- Make a easier delineation at 50%
- Whatever color-tables are decided on, you would get used to , or change it to preference
- During our busy time with 3 cells, it was good for SA, with other little cells developing around big cells.

- Southeast, over 70 was the threshold for the day

SRSOR
- Was neat to see increase in eni lightning, then overshooting top thereafter
- Had puffy cu field that was generally going west across cwa, when we got big storm on southern part, you could see cu field being injected into it. Upper clouds going east. Seeing that, gives you knowledge that it will be a long lived cell
- Seeing updrafts reorganize themselves within storms. Repoisitioning itself into more favoriable part of storm, gives you confidence that that storm may thrive. In near real time that is big
- In pre convective environment, looking at ll cu field, denoted were higher levels of moisture was present, you could basically see the moisture setting up. No more guessing where it is.
- No 1min data in the southeast today, but had a case where it would have been helpful. Convection developed on outflow boundary during FD (30 min) scan. This development was missed by routine imagery.
- In summer time, if there was 1min ir, could use it to identify thermal belts.
- 1min winds with fires, doing dss, if you have a plume and you think it is going to change based on winds in sat iamgery, that gives you lead time to make the call and say the plume will be changing direction... from imet perspective. Would want to warn of impending wind shift. Any heads up would be great.
- Overall we just need it all the time, across the country.

- If I had it, I would keep it up all the time, and keep ot detection up all the time, because its rare, it wouldn’t impeded your obs.

Lightning jump

- Easy to read, makes jumps obvious

- Saw sigs on base data sometimes before jump, during or after

- When storm was so pulsey, id look at this and pglm

- Storms were pulsey at times, and jumps in this and increase in pglm brought me back to the storm, couldn’t see it in other data.

PGLM

- We had 3 main cells we were monitoring, went through cycles of pulsing and dying. Looked liked it died on radar, then pglm came back, kept me aware of storm evolution, good SA tool, kept an eye on it

- Interesting to see extent of how far lightning got away from core of storm into anvil, anvil crawlers. Benefit of having extent

- I liked default colorbar, had familiar cold to hot.

- Green yellow red purple might be better. 

- Idea of defining colors with respect to flash rate. Blues 30, purples 40.