EWP Week 1 Day 3 Summary

For Wednesday, participants began operations in the New Orleans, LA and Grand Forks, ND CWA's. The New Orleans group moved to the Hasting's, NE area midway through the shift.

-Bill Line, NWS

• GOES-16 ABI Imagery and products
• Imagery
• Improved temporal and spatial resolution makes monitoring cloud top trends easier than with the old imagery.
• It improved my SA to have two panel VIS/IR next to my warning radar display
• Derived products (CAPE, LI, winds, dsi, tpw)
• In north south dakota, could see cape gradient along wind shift line analyzed in surface obs. Nose of stronger cape coming in from south. Storms developed on the western edge of the max. Got a good sense of the progression of the northward surge of greater instability and pw. As storms tapped into that, they intensified pretty quick
• In hastings, storms were moving slow and stayed week. They didn't quite get to the greatest instability
• I do like loading VIS on top of the cape or pw to fill in data gap holes with useful data
• Derived winds weren't good again. Both speed and direction were way wrong, compared to looking at the movement of clouds and other datasets. GOES-13 winds also looked much more realistic
• Channel differences
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• RGB composites
• I didn’t really get anything unique out of the RGB’s that I could see in the raw imagery
• I like the water vapor RGB once it was explained. There is a learning curve, but can be utility to get a feel for larger scale processes/features
• GLM
• Immediate things to address with GLM data:
• Allow political boundaries to overlay gridded lightning data.
• Lightning menu’s have so much stuff in them, it is tough to quickly get, or know, what I want to and should load.
• Forecasters need to tell lightning folks what they will use, and what they will never use, in order for change to happen.
• We had a case in north dakota where glm events preceded the first CG by a few minutes
• Need to fix the geolocation of lightning data (parallax). This is very important, especially for dss purposes
• ProbSevere
• Probtor was not very helpful with storms associated with the tropical system. It would be nice if you could have it work in this situation, as these are very difficult cases to identify tor’s. One storm had probs increase, but it was very late
• In the northeast US, we dont have classic supercells, but often get quick spin ups. If probTor could key on these, it'd be very helpful.
• I did see utility in the hail and wind model. It was a little slow with catching up on hail side. Storm ref core to 30k feet, issued warning, then probsevere picked up. When we had multiple cells going, nice to have this on a display for SA as it will pick up on storms I should interrogate closer.
• At a time when probwind was at 90%, very high, we had a strong wind damage report
• On a storm I warned on, after i warned, probsevere increased. This increased my confidence in my warning.
• There are so many products, probsevere puts it all together into one  nice quick view of what's happening.
• Never tipped my warning decision, but more useful when there is a lot going on.
• Percentages seemed a little low with our storms yesterday.
• It's nice to have this second eye to give confidence in my warnings.
• I like to zoom out, get a quick look at what is going on elsewhere in my cwa.
• NUCAPS
• Looking at metop in the morning, we modified, cape was over 1000, seemed on par
• Nucaps pass about 1.5 hours before convection developed. I paid most attention to FL and -20C level. I used these levels for the whole day when looking at radar. You could verify model by doing this, or use this instead of model values. Don't have to modify soundings to get this information.
• One can use nucaps upper level info to verify how model is doing
• With tropical system, we were looking for cape in a few areas that were available. There was a bit of cape to sustain cells, this was good information
• In hastings, I was looking at core of instability, so it was nice to have here. Good confirmation that instability was there
• During 19z pass, you could see signs that a capping inversion was in place, that information was very helpful.
• If you’re concerned a model might not be verifying correctly, in any situation, I like idea of comparing the nucaps profiles to model profiles.
• There would be utility to plotting 2d plan view of critical levels (-20c, 0c)
• I’d use sounding to assess stability, dry or moist areas. Use plan views to look for/asses gradients spatially
• We’d like to get readout from nucaps availability display (cape, critical levels, etc)