Split Cloud Top Phase and Split Window: Some first impressions

I haven't really, truly, looked at loops of GOES-16 Split Cloud Top Phase and Split Window until now. I sort of understand what they are trying to show, but they are very busy to look at/watch.

Within the Split Cloud Phase, I can see that the tops of the convective clouds are generally either water (if the cloud tops are, I assume, lower in the atmosphere) or large ice crystals (which makes sense, given the amount of water/ice in convective clouds). But, there are also high clouds over the western High Plains that "should" be comprised primarily of ice particles, yet show up as negative values, which, if I understand the Cloud Top Phase coding correctly are "water" clouds? Huh? Maybe the color-coding has been flipped from the handout we were given on this product?

The Split Window is, to me, almost too busy to be used in operations. If this product is just trying to show dry environments vs moist environments, maybe a "smoothing" to the color table would help? It just looks too choppy to me at the moment. I'm not quite sure how to use this product, yet.

- Thomas Bell

Forecast 5/16/18

An MCV from overnight convection is located over northeast OK and will drift eastward over the Ozarks later this afternoon. Moderate instability is observed over much of AR with AllSkyLAP CAPE values on the order of 1000-1500 J/kg.  The 12z raob from LZK indicated a fair amount of instability aloft, aided by relatively steep lapse rates from near 700mb through approx 550 mb. The AllSkyLAP PWAT was ~1.3" at 12z which compared very nicely to the 1.33" observed by the raob. Relatively dry air was observed aloft per the AllSkyLAP 0.7-0.3 sigma PWAT.  MLCAPE is progged to increase to around 2000 J/kg this afternoon with a DCAPE just over 1000 J/kg.

Fig 1. Split Water Vapor depicting MCV over northeast OK.

Fig 2. MCV evident in the high-level water vapor imagery.

Storms are ongoing over the Ozarks, but are expected to increase in coverage across the state throughout the afternoon in the weakley capped, low-shear environment. Shear will be limited today given the overall weak synoptic flow and vicinity of the aforementioned MCV. In general, anticipate strong to marginally severe, pulse ordinary cells but a few multicellular clusters are possible should storms develop strong enough cold pools. The primary hazards will be hail up to 1 inch in diamter and localized damaging winds.

wall_cloud

Watching and wating

Nothing moving in yet but using the 10.3-12.3 channel differences fairly easy to see the moisture tongue moving north ahead of the short wave into the northern plains.  Once you get use to the color tables this is helping to identify where the moisture is moving.