This week I was lucky enough to experiment with tools and products that will help forecasters make faster and more accurate decisions regarding severe weather. As someone who works on the TV side of things, I have a different view of how useful these products could be to me and my colleagues. While the forecasters main goal is to issue timely warnings to save lives and property, my goal is to quickly and clearly communicate warnings and threats to the public, via tv, social media. etc... .
While ALL the products are valuable, there are several which I would think would be most beneficial to me if I had them available to me to share with viewers
1 minute VIS. Satellite- Total eye candy...after all I work in a visual world. The stunning displays would give our viewers something to look at, and I could point out certain features that concerned me (rapid development etc...).
Lightning Jump- Another one of my favorite visual tools. I would use a modified version of this, and obviously the language wouldn't be "sigma". I could however imagine a version of this where the categories were small-moderate-large-extreme...or negative. It would be easy to communicate quickly that if we see these jumps, that means the potential is there for severe storm development, or at least these storms warrant close watching. Once storms reach severe levels I'm not sure I would continue to use that tool. I believe I would switch at that point to PGLM.
PGLM- I would use this tool to track severe storms and show the lightning. We currently show lightning flash counts, and the viewers love it, but I would prefer the visual display presented as it is in PGLM.
PROB Severe- Initially I was ALL FOR IT. I loved the outline display. After tracking storms in the Southeast today where the product under-performed due to a different atmospheric environment, an environment that is much closer to my home one, I changed my mind. If this product could be fine tuned specifically for region or season, then I would LOVE to show viewers a severe probability parameter storm cell by storm cell.
CI & CI Severe- Still unsure of the value this would have to viewers. If there were no storms present, but storms expected I could see this being something that could help show storm potential, but I would want to have higher confidence in the product. I would probably also only want to show probs of 80 or higher on air.
Even though I wouldn't necessarily use the assessment products on air (LAP, NU CAPS) I am glad that NWS forecasters will have these available because I see their value as well.
-StormFront
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