SPG Blog Post Day 1

Today, the group learned about the suite of satellite products that we will be testing. Below I will include some notes on two of the products we learned about during the operations portion of the day.

Figure 1: LightningCast-ECONUS-compare product

• During this exercise, we were placed into two different CWAs: MLB and JAX. I was in the MLB CWA, monitoring developing convection over the FL peninsula, as a frontal boundary moves through to the north. There was a marginal risk, per SPC guidance.
• Above is the LightningCast ECONUS comparison product. The top two panels used GOES-19 satellite imagery, while the bottom two panels used MRMS data. The left panels are V1 of LightningCast, and the right panels are V2.
• I noticed that V2 improved on noise reduction, with low percent chances of lightning being more confined to developing storms. V1 seemed to have some low percentages over clouds that looked like low level cumulus, but V2 fixed that.
• I really liked how this product highlights areas of active storms, and where the best chances of thunder are next. I find the extent of the LightningCast product to help for DSS purposes, as I have an idea on what areas ahead of the storm should prepare to see lightning.
• The color scale, following SPC categories, works nicely and is easy to interpret, from a forecaster point of view.

Figure 2: Octane CTC

• Figure 2 shows the OCTANE Cloud Top Cooling product.
• This suite of products became helpful as I began to understand their use.
• The CTC product seems to be very informative on convection development, and differentiating between the various thunderstorm phases. The color scale changes from green, yellow, to red to indicate cloud tops beginning to cool, and are colored at the rate at which they cool every 5 minutes. This way, the user can see where cloud tops are rapidly cooling, and thus where convection is developing/strengthening.
• The colormap is relatively easy to understand, from my perspective.
• Playing around with the color scale may help to really hone in on developing storms, as from looking around the CONUS, there is a lot of blues and greens. If someone wanted to narrow the scale a little, to reduce the amount of data to sift through, that could help make things a little easier to navigate. I personally don’t mind it, because I think it’s a good way to see general cloud coverage and cloud types.

Kelvin-Helm