Lapse Rates and CAPE on NUCAPS plan view, North Dakota

Some observations about the NUCAPS plan view products. The available layers/levels are not traditional to most forecasters when viewing products such as CAPE or Lapse Rates, with pressure or theta surfaces. Most forecasters and model guidance traditionally use heights or layers based on kilometers. The lack of a surface based CAPE option would be nice. With that said, using a layer of 850-500mb, as a proxy for mid-level lapse rates, they were comparable to the similar output to the RAP at the same time. Similar to the under-representation of GOES-16, the Computed CAPE, for the same layer, appeared to be lower than the values presented by the RAP.

Dale Doback