Week 1 Day 2 Wrap Up

The forecasters finished up a long busy day yesterday with numerous storms occurring across central Kansas most of the day. Feedback from the day is posted below.

• ProbSevere
  Seemed to pick up on severe weather earlier than the radar and MESH seemed to pick up on the severity of the storm
  ProbTor picked up on a small tornado near Buffalo, Ok where it increased to 70% in just a few minutes
  Good for situational awareness on the busy day that was yesterday with a lot of storms around, it helped pick out storms to examine more
  Probabilities seem to be really well calibrated to the severe probabilities
  ProbSevere stayed high on hail on a left split supercell even though MESH dropped off some
  Probabilities picked up on the increased lightning before MESH picked up
  Still working on optimizing the display to be able to view ProbSevere and ProbTor displayed together
  Gives some increased confidence to warn a little earlier than might would have with just radar
  
  
  CI
  Seemed to really have problems along the dry line
  Stayed low the entire time
  Had a problem in the code that is looking to get fixed ASAP
  
  
  GLM
  Flash rates seemed to be lower than expected compared to some of the other networks
  Didn’t notice any nice smooth trends up or down than what was expected
  A lot of the data use was really a learning experience using some of the new data sets
  Values in the total energy did seem to spike up prior to severe reports and tornadoes
  Some of the color table cut offs could be re done for their to be more contrast
  Would like to either have some transparency or more ideally a contour to be able to overlay on satellite data and still see the storm tops
  Being able to combine everything into one panel would be ideal to save screen real estate when in operations
  Quite a bit of training will be needed to get forecasters up to speed and to understand what they are viewing when they use it operations
  Training on uses in different environments or storm modes would be ideal to train up forecasters on the uses
  What definitely needs to be trained on is the benefits of what GLM gives you that other ground based network doesn’t
  Having job sheets for live weather of what to look for in the lightning data while using it
  Need to build off of applications of the data
  Integrating with other lightning data is important
  
  
  NUCAPS
  Modified wasn’t making modifications to some of the profiles that needed to be modified
  The surface data should still at least be modified based on the RTMA data even if nothing else is
  Cloudiness yesterday caused some trouble with most of the soundings
  Gridded data wasn’t really used at all with all of the cloudy areas around yesterday
  Forecasters had to modify themselves since the modification wasn’t working on some of the soundings
  The profiles seemed to match pretty well in the mid and upper levels to the 19Z special sounding from DDC
  
  
  ABI and All-Sky LAP
  Baseline stability indices were blocked a lot yesterday, but the all-sky LAP seemed to match up pretty well to the CAPE expected over the area
  The satellite retrievals seemed to bring down the GFS first guess too low by about 500 J in most places
  Split Window difference showed some higher values ahead of and behind the dry line
  The derived winds compared to the special sounding were slightly weak from 500mb down to the surface
  Could make out the dry line boundary in the split window difference with low level moisture pooling on the boundary
  Looked at layered precipitable water to look at increased moisture above the boundary layer and the mid level moisture started increasing really fast in central Kansas. The convection developed right along the moisture boundary
  Cloud Phase RGB really picked up on the initiation but it could also be picked up on in the visible imagery
• 
  

Michael