When A “Bolt From the Blue” Shatters Your Confidence

 Today presented one of those moments where you feel pretty confident in your messaging, but then mother nature throws you for a loop. For the Red, White, and Lavender festival, a line of general thunderstorms was moving over the festival right around start time of our forecast period so this gave me an opportunity to test the Stoplight tool and LightningCast in a messaging scenario for lightning cessation.

What seemed like a pretty straightforward case of DSS messaging to festival goers regarding the line moving east and lightning threat ending turned into a stressful situation for me. At roughly 1935Z, LightningCast showed probabilities were trending downward while the Stoplight tool was also trending toward yellow and green to suggest we would be approaching that “all clear” state. See the LightningCast dashboard graphic below with the main decision timeframe boxed in yellow. So, I confidently messaged my Festival Coordinator an estimated all clear time to be the top of the hour.

Figure 1 . LightningCast Dashboard over Manhattan Regional Airport, near the Red White and Lavender Festival depicting lightning probabilities trending downwards during my DSS decision timeframe.

But then at ~1955Z, the Stoplight tool turned red again WEST of my site (while the Festival itself was under green) as the FED picked up on what I'm guessing were anvil crawlers. I was surprised because the anvil looked pretty thin to me over that area so I honestly didn't know what to think. Then, ENTLN lightning plot showed a number of cloud flashes within 10mi east of the site and eventually plotted a negative CG barely 6miles to the east of the festival at 2015Z (see Figure 2). Talk about shattering a DSS forecaster’s confidence!  It seemed to be one of those “bolt out of the blue” strokes, too close for comfort! To LightningCast’s credit, probabilities never went below 20%, with V1 even hovering around 40% the entire decision timeframe.  Mother Nature sure taught me yet another lesson in humility that one cannot be too confident no matter what!

Figure 2. The Stoplight Tool plotted with FED, ENTLN and DSS range rings at 2015Z. The black arrow denotes the location of the negative CG about 6mi east of the site.

I'd like to think that in a real scenario, I would have been a little more conservative in estimating a time of all clear. But with this being an experiment, I felt a little more bold in just "going for it".

Figure 3. A longer loop of the Stoplight Tool, ENTLN and FED products, including the decision timeframe and point of confidence ruined.

And just for fun, because I’m hooked, below is a loop of the CONUS OCTANE CTC, Speed and Direction products for a rapidly intensifying storm over Cloud and Clay Counties.  Although not as seamless as the mesoscale versions of these tools, there is still a lot of utility in diagnosing storm development and strength with CONUS vs traditional satellite imagery. I’m even becoming more and more a fan of the “blues” colorscale for the CTC product (left hand panel) when plotted on the Ch 13 product. The stark contrast between the dark blues/purples against the rainbow of the IR anvil really catch the eye.

Figure 4 . ECONUS Octane CTC product (left), Octane Speed (middle), and Octane Direction (right).

Astrophage