Daily Summary: Week 3, Day 1 (2 May 2016)

Week 3 began with participants forecasting/warning for the Sterling and Blacksburg CWA's. The big story of the day was the severe weather experienced in the DC metro area, where storms produced large hail.

LAP
- Lap data showed the instability gradient well; that's where convection developed.
- CAPE was helpful in giving an estimate that storms were moving into a more unstable environment. Storms did develop along a strong CAPE gradient

CI
- I wish the color-table was labeled.
- The two areas in sterling that developed - regular CI capture it well with a couple hours of lead time
- Early in the day, there were probs just above 50% that did not initiate.
- Severe CI captured the development of the severe storm that hit DC

ProbSevere
- This is a great SA tool to have during warning operations. We have had it in the Milwaukee office for a few years now, and everyone uses it.
- I noticed that it did not do as well under the cirrus canopy where there was no satellite growth information
- When you see a jump in ProbSevere, you are alerted that the storm is strengthening.
- Especially on marginal days with a lot of subsevere wind and hail and trying to decide to warn or not, seeing a jump in ProbSevere gave me confidence to warn, and not seeing it also gave me confidence not to warn.
- Reverse trend helped. The storm went up, produced severe, then ProbSevere values dropped. At that point I knew I could let the storm go.
- We want to know which storms we need to look at now, and ProbSevere clearly shows this.

SRSOR
- It is a thing of beauty
- Especially for updraft growth, it is a great tool to guage how quickly the updraft is building.
A lot of time, radar is behind the curve
- It is neat to correlate satellite with radar, and see which cells in satellite correlate with cells in radar.
- The parallax error fix should be sent to all offices. With DC storm it was helpful in showing exactly where the storms were headed.

Sat-derived winds
- This is very good info. We watched a mid-level speed max approach our area, which increased environmental shear as storms developed.

Lightning Jump
- I don't like the display, I would prefer a contour
- I underlayed the jumps on radar, and it worked initially, but eventually got too difficult to see the product.
- It gave a good heads up to intensifying updrafts
- Seeing jumps with increasing ProbSevere indicated we better warn on this.
- Great SA tool
- With DC cell, we had a split, then a jump, helped me to rewarn on that storm

NUCAPS
- What I didn't like is how objective it is to adjust the temperature near the surface
- It will be beneficial to have the modifications automated, especially if used during warning ops.
- It did show there was a moisture increase and warming. This is nice to see in the soundings.
- Compared to the 18z RAOB, CAPE was right on, PW was a little dry.