Filling in LightningCast Contours in AWIPS

 TFX was focused on DSS messaging since it became evident fairly early on in the day that we were not expecting severe convection. The event we had was a State Track Meet with a range ring of 10 miles. Since there were a lot of contours to look at, our group decided to load them as an image and play around with the fill value of the LightningCast probabilities for easier visualization of imminent lightning threat for our partners. To do this, we loaded LightningCast as an image, went into the Change Colors option of the Img LightningCast and set the 10/30/50/70/90 thresholds to match with the colors, including setting 0-10% as transparent. Then we overlaid MRMS on top of it and set everything below 20 dbZ to transparent so we didn’t get any noise from the light showers since we were more focused on the thunderstorms with higher dBZs.

Initial attempt at filling in the LightningCast contours.

Later on in the day, we settled on a less opaque version of the colorbars and we were able to save them such that others in the TFX group could use them on the AWIPS user account as “LightningCastFilled”. This allowed the reflectivity above 20dBZ to stand out more so partners knew where the heaviest rain was without it blending into the bright filled LightningCast.

Final decision on the colormap filling in the LightningCast contours overlaid with MRMS composite reflectivity above 20 dBZ.

Our group members also noticed the default Max and Min for both versions of LightningCast (when loaded as an image) were originally set in AWIPS to random numbers like -20 and 113. Version 1’s default range was different than Version 2’s which added to the visual discrepancy. Before we figured this out, the contours and images did not match up in space (i.e. the image went outside the contour for the same value), but turning on samples revealed they were the same value. In theory, these should be set to 0 and 100 given that LightningCast is a probability. Once we changed these values on the LightningCast Img product in AWIPS to be set to a range of 0 to 100 and reset the colorbar levels according to this scale, they matched up perfectly with the contours. Our suggestion for developers was to ensure the default for these is 0 to 100 in AWIPS if they were ever to be loaded as an image.

-millibar