Monitoring LC V1 and V2 in Florida

At the beginning of week #2, forecasters were over Florida getting used to the products that they would be looking at for the week. For the Lightningcast product, one of the questions that was being asked by developers was differences between Version 1 (V1) and Version 2 (V2). V1 included 4 ABI inputs (channel 2 [the red band], channel 5 [the snow/ice band], channel 13 [the IR-window], and channel 15 [the dirty IR-window]), with V2 also including Muli-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) reflectivity at -10C. Contours for both versions are shown in figure 1. Both versions looked fairly similar in the spatial extent and timing of the contours.

Figure 1: Lightningcast contours for V1 (left panel) and V2 (right panel) over Florida on 11 May 2026 from 2026Z to 2121Z. Satellite imagery in the background is the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB from GOES-19.

While not examined by forecasters today (but will be for fictional DSS events later in the week), the lightning dashboard for the Gainesville Regional Airport (KGNV) showed that V2 had a better handle on lightning cessation than V1 for that particular location (figure 2). V2 showed a ~5% probability of lightning within the next hour at 2050 UTC, while V1 reached that same probability at 2118 UTC, roughly 30 minutes later.

Figure 2: Lightning dashboard for KGNV. V1 probabilities at that location are shown by the red line and V2 probabilities at that location are shown by the green line. The GLM flash counts within 5-miles/5-min (8-miles/5-min) are shown by the dark (light) blue circles.

-Aurora