Monitoring for lightning at the Twigs Craft Fair

HWT forecasters in the Albany, NY office were monitoring for lightning potential in storms moving in from the north towards their DSS event, the Twigs Craft Fair in Speculator, NY. One tool they used for monitoring trends was ProbSevere LightningCast. The "J" point in Figure 1 is the location of the fair.

Figure 1: LightningCast contours of the probability of lightning in the next hour (blue=10%, cyan=25%, green=50%, magenta=75%), GOES-16 daytime cloud phase distinction RGB (background), and GOES-16 GLM flash-extent density (orange, semi-transparent, foreground). The "J" point is the location of the Twigs Craft Fair.

LightningCast meteograms (see Figure 2) are available via the web for all NWS terminal aerodrome forecast sites (TAFs). For the HWT this week, we're creating custom sites for simulated DSS events. We want to gauge how much forecasters would use or benefit from being able to have an operational on-demand capability for LightningCast meteograms.

In the figure below, the top panel shows the probability of lightning in the next 60 minutes over time, as produced by LightningCast from the GOES-East 5-minute sector (red) and 1-minute sector (yellow). The bottom panel shows observed lightning flashes from GOES-East GLM (blue) and Earth Networks (orange) for two different spatial radii (within ~5 miles and ~10 miles) and within the previous 5 minutes.

Figure 2: Meteograms of LightningCast probabilities and lightning observations for a DSS event ("Twigs Craft Fair") in Speculator, NY.