Overview: Week 2, Day 1

10 AM 

Week 2 of the Satellite Experiment kicked off this morning, with a fresh batch of forecasters and a recharged group of developers. Convection was difficult to find unless you were along the Gulf or Atlantic coasts, and with marginal deep layer shear the potential for severe weather was also also categorized as Marginal from SPC in its 13Z outlook. After our orientation session, the forecast discussion today was focused on western Louisiana, Florida, and the Carolinas. Ultimately we decided to localize to the NWS offices in Jacksonville, FL (JAX) and Melbourne, FL (MLB) with the expectation that upstream convection and land-sea breeze interactions could initiate and sustain convection throughout our operations window (18-22 Z).

1 PM

Operations kicked off with the developers providing hands-on demonstrations and walk-throughs with the forecasters. With a slower severe weather pattern on the first day, we encouraged everyone to think of today as a 'training day'. Forecasters asked several questions about the synthetic GXI imagery, such as the heights sampled by the 0.91 and 5.15 µm bands, the impacts of snow cover, and how the synthetic products compare to the real 0.91 µm imagery from FCI. We also talked about making RGB products from the synthetic imagery, and realized that the imagery specialists at CIRA had taken the liberty of remapping the products to the ABI 2km grids (kudos!). I'm hoping to create some RGBs this week that we can play with and improve on. What would forecasters like to see in an RGB? Moisture by height? Low level boundaries?

2 PM

We got an MD from SPC! Not a great chance for a watch, but good to know some severe risk exists in our CWAs.

4 PM

The rest of the operations day was pretty slow, so I spent some time working (arguing?) with AWIPS to make an RGB for the Synthetic GXI data. It's a work in progress...

Found an interesting case of dissipating and initiating convection form the perspective of LightningCast v2 and Lightning Stoplight v2 further west near the Alabama coast. You can watch the probabilities drop and the stoplight transitions from red to green for the dissipating storm, while probabilities increase shortly before the first lightning flashes. Lots of anvil debris to obscure the signal of initiating convection in this example, but there appeared to be at least some lead time by LightningCast before the first lightning flashes appeared from the Lightning Stoplight.

A nice thunderstorm went up east of Jacksonville, with a notable cooling signature from the OCTANE-CONUS Cloud-Top Cooling product. I compared that with the OCTANE-MESO product, and may encourage forecasters to do the same later this week.

To wrap up, I decided to explore all the flavors of the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB with a procedure I called 'oops-all-dcpd'. 

• Upper Left: GOES-19 CONUS
• Upper Right: OCTANE MesoAnywhere (from GOES-19 CONUS)
• Lower Left: SZA (from GOES-19 CONUS)
  
• Lower Right: GOES-19 MESO

Kevin