HWT 2023 underway

The HWT is back in person this week, after a 3-year hiatus. Forecasters have been working in Lubbock TX, Amarillo TX, and Great Falls MT. ProbSevere LightningCast and ProbSevere v3 are being evaluated this year. Here are few notes from our conversations regarding ProbSevere:

• Forecasters find the time series capabilities for each product to be very effective, and desire them in operations.
• Forecasters look mainly at the parallax-corrected LightningCast contours in AWIPS
  
• Forecasters have appreciate the improved calibration over ProbSevere v3 over v2. This often means that PSv3 is less than PSv2, but this comes with a much lower false alarm rate.
• Furthermore, we've seen a number of storms with higher PSv3 probabilities early on, compared to PSv2.
• Forecasters use both ProbSevere v3 and LightningCast in GRLevel software in their offices, as well as in AWIPS.
  
• We had a discussion about making LightningCast contours more configurable, such as custom contours that could be individually toggled on and off. 

Figure 1: LightningCast contours, GOES-16 ABI day-cloud phase distinction RGB, and GOES-16 GLM flash-extent density.

Figure 2: ProbSevere v3 contours, MRMS MergedReflectivity, and NWS severe weather warnings in west Texas.