Week 2 summary and comment round up

As week 2 comes to a close 11 May 2018, we review the comments from our final debrief below. Much of this echos the discovery and opinions from throughout the week.


GLM:

• Training remains an important question and consideration.  Would love to have subject-matter expert available locally for all forecasters (may become frustrated by the data and not use it w/o that person).  
• SOO or focal point can be that local subject-matter expert, however, this will demand evolving training exercises.  Move beyond VLAB, work with WDTD to create hands-on and locally-relevant training opportunities.
• Typical order of use this week:  Total Energy (primary), FED (secondary) and Flash Size (tertiary). 
• Limit the amount of data available on first release (only to the three products listed above???); eliminate point-based or centroid products.
• Integrate GLM data with ground-based lightning systems to help understand and alleviate parallax concerns, particularly when issuing a special weather statement or IDSS for lightning.
•  Want to work more cases and focus areas.  E.g., where radar coverage is poor (western US), fire weather, and aviation -- appears that areal extent and pre-Cloud-to-Ground information will be important.  Context is important and will drive various need/demand for individual GLM products.

ProbSevere (all hazards):

• Did not trust the probabilities in all environments this week.
• Did well with hail and if storms were a bit more steady state.
• Seemed to behave worse in western US and with wind threats.
• Liked using the probabilities as trend information for storm intensity, but not necessarily a particular number.
• Would like to see trend graphs not only of probs, but also internal items in algorithm.
• Preferred the individual hazard products (read-out too long on single ProbSevere)
• Some confusion regarding time scale of probability (minutes vs hour)
• ProbTor could be more difficult to understand reasoning for probs than other hazards; Use a lower threshold for ProbTor and adjust color tables accordingly.
• Would like to see "weak" "strong" indicators on more than just glaciation rate. 
• Difficult to pick out differences in storms between 70-100% probs; color table could use more delineation at higher end (all storms appeared pink).
• Could be useful to communicate impact w/public - would remove numbers and use Low - Mod - High for threats.

Convective Initiation (CI) and Severe-CI:

• Not terribly impressed by algorithm:  completely missed some objects, overdone in some areas, underdone in others.  Hard to understand why.
• Can provide situational awareness, does give some indication of development, but algorithm may need modifications to be more useful.
• Suggest either removing probs <30% or moving to transparent (to know algorithm is tracking these storms).  Large blue confetti-areas are distracting.
• Difficult to utilize in environments where noisy and chaotic. 
• Did not understand differences between algorithms (CI and SVR-CI):  why would CI be low and SVR-CI be high? 

All-Sky LAPS:

• Used in pre-convective environment, showed instability and moisture fields and gradients in those well.
• Could use in social media posts to explain the "WHY" behind the forecast.

NUCAPS:

• Data from JPSS integration was new (or relatively new) to most forecasters.
• Development of best-practices, easier menu-access (not buried in volume browser) and quick-guides would be helpful for increased use.
• Earlier access to data is highly important, but also need better visualization options.
• NSHARP options need to be more user-friendly, cumbersome to pull up multiple soundings in different CAVE displays to compare.  Would like to access shear parameters and get box&whisker plots.
• Difficult to evaluate trade-off of no-data available vs model integration into products.  Would like keep separate from LAPS options, but can be difficult to evaluate with gaps in data coverage in gridded products.