While week 2 of the HWT Spring Experiment started out fairly quiet it certainly didn't end that way. Wednesday night's tornadoes in N. Texas ended up being the highlight of the demonstration so far and a lot of good feedback was collected from that event as well as the rest of the week. Check it out...
GOES-R CI
- 'On days where convection in more questionable it may be nice to have the ability to filter out the lower values to get rid of the confetti-like display, however on days where convective initiation is much more likely, those lower values provide some valuable information and help in keying in on particular growth.'
- 'Values of 57% or greater seemed to do fairly well on identifying initiation throughout the week.'
CTC
- 'The CTC is useful but does have trouble in areas of cirrus.'
- 'Most of the storms that developed did have a high POD, but also had some FAR.'
- 'In operations we're looking for which storms have potential. This is where the CTC would definitely be useful.'
- 'For situational awareness the CTC is a big thing. It identifies which storms to watch.'
- 'It would have been a better experience on Wednesday night if we'd had Rapid Scan Operations for GOES-13.'
Nearcast
- 'The CAPE field was good to compare to other CAPE fields though it can be hard to wrap your head around exactly what you're looking at and how it was computed.'
- 'The color scheme was a bit confusing. With the theta-E difference I'm used to thinking that green, yellow, and red values, are values to key in on, but in this case it was the darker blues and pinks.'
- 'The GOES-E and GOES-W images were definitely different, they didn't match, so I wasn't sure which one I should look at. It would definitely be useful to have a seamless overlap.'
- 'CAPE is conventionally what we're used to looking at, but the theta-E difference was also very useful.'
- 'Yesterday I looked at the theta-E and PW values... there were no high PW values [in west KS] and so it made sense why the storms there weren't growing. This information was very beneficial to have.'
- 'Then on Wednesday the storms in OK and TX formed right on the low-level and mid-level maximums of theta-E, so it did very well.'
RGB Airmass
- 'Yesterday the RGB showed showed drier, cooler air behind the convection which is what you would expect, but as the day went on you could see the moisture return to the area... because of this I kept my eye on what was going on there.'
- 'On Wednesday the dryline structure in OK and TX was very visible and we keyed in on this area.'
- The RGB gives you more information about the airmass source, it's composition, etc. It's very helpful information to have for situational awareness.'
- 'I liked the RGB as an overview, especially when you first sit down to see where airmasses are setting up. Though once you get into the nitty gritty of warning operations I didn't use it as much.'
Simulated Imagery
- 'We'd use it as a comparison to the actual IR to see what was influencing the model later.'
- 'It doesn't seem to handle anvils very well, but this may be a good thing because you could see where the storms were developing without the anvil getting in the way.'
- 'It's fairly remarkable what this imagery can do, giving you a satellite image so many hours in advance.'
- 'It did very well this past Tuesday in holding off on convective initiation up in the Western GL.'
PGLM
- 'Add the number or percentage of sensors currently working... for testing purposes it's crucial that we have this information so that we can use the product accurately.'
- 'Perhaps the 30 flashes/min threshold should be colored different so that it stands out more.'
- 'I used this product to identify which storms were starting to intensify and what cells I should key in on.'
Well that's a wrap for the week 2 debrief... but don't forget, our 'Tales from the Testbed' webinar will be beginning within thirty minutes and will cover the use of all of our experimental products during the N. Texas tornado event on Wednesday night. It should be a very interesting discussion!
Showing posts with label Sounder Airmass. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sounder Airmass. Show all posts
Friday, May 17, 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
RGB Airmass Use Over NE and KS
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| 051613 1901 UTC RGB Airmass |
The GOES Sounder Air Mass image is very useful in highlighting the different features of interest for today. First of all the compact disturbance which is about to leave NE Colorado to the east/northeast is well visualized by mid-level drying in the image. Weak forcing ahead of that feature already caused some initiation over N/NE Nebraska with another round of storms evolving over extreme NE Colorado. Of interest is a southward extending and weakening vorticity lobe which is about to enter Kansas from the west right now. Also, the dryline is well recognized by that product, showing warm/moist air ahead of the dryline advecting to the north (green-ish colour). This correlates well with mid-level moisture, seen in latest RAP output. A gradual transition from ‘green to blue’ occurs when moving westward (e.g. towards the TX Panhandle). This corresponds well with some residual low-level moisture f.ex. in the lowest 850 hPa, which gradually mixes out. We will monitor both the dryline and the eastward moving but weakening PVA lobe for some kind of interaction during the following hours and eventually for sporadic CI.
Helge
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
RGB Depicts Shortwave and Developing Convection in W TX
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| 051513 1901 UTC RGB Airmass |
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| 051513 2001 UTC RGB Airmass and 500mb Heights |
Scotten
Using the RGB Airmass around DFW
We are setting up in the Dallas/Fort Worth CWA today, and expect some busy weather in a few hours. So, I’ve been scanning the various products to get a general overview. The SPoRT GOES RGB product is good to get a general sense of the airmass structure. Decided to do a second post on it today to start off.
In the image below, the greenish yellow colors represent the more humid subtropical airmass, while the blue to red color is the drier, more continental airmass. You can see the approximate position of the dryline at the interface of these colors. Of course, the sounder is sampling the upper mid levels here (400-500mb) and doesn’t exactly correspond to the surface dryline…you can see this in the overlaid obs. Still, this is a product that can give you a quick idea of the general airmass setup.
In the image below, the greenish yellow colors represent the more humid subtropical airmass, while the blue to red color is the drier, more continental airmass. You can see the approximate position of the dryline at the interface of these colors. Of course, the sounder is sampling the upper mid levels here (400-500mb) and doesn’t exactly correspond to the surface dryline…you can see this in the overlaid obs. Still, this is a product that can give you a quick idea of the general airmass setup.
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| 051513 1800 UTC RGB Airmass and Surface Observations/Winds |
CL
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
RGB Shows Airmass Changes and Extent of Convective Development
When you want a visual depiction of what the airmass structure looks like, the GOES Sounder RGB product can fill the bill. The image below is that product at 22Z, along with RAP13 500 mb winds to show the airmass movement. You can clearly see the airmass difference along the Red River. The bluer colors are more typical of midlatitude airmasses, while the greenish red area is associated with a subtropical airmass. There is even a wind shift line in the RAP 500 mb winds, showing the airmass boundary. The convection over west Texas shows up clearly as the white areas. These storms are feeding off the better instability and moisture provided from the south.
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| 051413 2200 UTC RGB Airmass and 500mb winds |
CL
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
EWP daily debriefing 5/7
This afternoon we had our first EWP daily debrief from the previous day's activities. Yesterday the focus was on the mid-Atlantic coast, specifically the Blacksburg, VA CWA, and while forecasters did issue a handful of warnings, it was an overall quiet day. However, the more docile weather allowed them a chance to work through each set of new data, learning which products they have at their disposal and how to use them. Here are a few comments picked up throughout the day:
Simulated Imagery
- 'We used the simulated imagery to forecast the dissipation of storms in the evening.' This along with the Nearcasting indicated the dissipation of storms in the area of interest.
- 'The WRF simulated imagery seems to be more spotty; it doesn't often seem to forecast the broader cloud shields associated with storm systems.'
Nearcasting Model
- 'The theta-e difference showed stable air moving into the area' and along with the simulated imagery, was used in the forecasting of the dissipation of the storms.
- 'I liked the two and three hour forecasting'
GOES-R CI and Cloud Top Cooling
- Because of the more docile weather 'there were no 80/90% CI values so it made the product more difficult to use'
RGB Airmass
- 'It takes some time to intuitively understand exactly what you're looking at with this product and how it can be integrated into your forecasting techniques, but it has potential'
Training
- Forecasters completed a training shift previous to their arrival in Norman. Monday was then used as a low key forecasting day, giving them a chance to get familiar with the products in an operational setting
- 'Having a chance to interact and use the products on a less busy day was very helpful'
Stay tuned to the blog for further feedback and updates on daily activity!
Simulated Imagery
- 'We used the simulated imagery to forecast the dissipation of storms in the evening.' This along with the Nearcasting indicated the dissipation of storms in the area of interest.
- 'The WRF simulated imagery seems to be more spotty; it doesn't often seem to forecast the broader cloud shields associated with storm systems.'
Nearcasting Model
- 'The theta-e difference showed stable air moving into the area' and along with the simulated imagery, was used in the forecasting of the dissipation of the storms.
- 'I liked the two and three hour forecasting'
GOES-R CI and Cloud Top Cooling
- Because of the more docile weather 'there were no 80/90% CI values so it made the product more difficult to use'
RGB Airmass
- 'It takes some time to intuitively understand exactly what you're looking at with this product and how it can be integrated into your forecasting techniques, but it has potential'
Training
- Forecasters completed a training shift previous to their arrival in Norman. Monday was then used as a low key forecasting day, giving them a chance to get familiar with the products in an operational setting
- 'Having a chance to interact and use the products on a less busy day was very helpful'
Stay tuned to the blog for further feedback and updates on daily activity!
Friday, June 15, 2012
Final EWP weekly debrief
Today marks our final day in the Spring Experiment! We spent a couple hours prior to the weekly "Tales from the Testbed" webinar debriefing our final group of forecasters on their experience this week with the various products and the experiment overall.
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "I'm going to go back to work and be asking my ITO during operations, 'where's the CTC product?'"
- "I thought both the CI products were very useful... the CI product (SATCAST), I like the idea of having the probabilities... I not sure that you really need the low ones (maybe under 50)... you weren't seeing CI with those values... There were some times where we would see some organization with some areas with low values and I started to think that something would happen, but nothing did... so I wonder if it might be misleading."
- "I think there is definitely benefit in forecasters having access to both of the CI products... I found myself comparing the two to each other a lot and gaining my confidence that something was really going on."
- "I wasn't sure how much usefulness there was over elevation (for both products)... which could be expected... you really need to be aware of your environment."
- "If you looked at the day where there were the Dallas supercells, I found it really useful... I actually warned on the CTC and it worked out well... It preceed the 60 dBZ and 1" mesh by about 20-30 minutes."
- "I tended almost to gravitate more to the CTC... the CI product had more false alarms, maybe not with the highest probabilities, but there were a lot of 70s that did nothing."
- "There was a lot of noise with the lower values in the CI product... I can easily go in and turn of anything below 50 in the color curve if I wanted to."
- "I had several cases where I would get a 70-75 on the CI and then there would be nothing on the CTC, and then 15 minutes later there would be something on the CTC and that usually resulted with 50 minutes or so of lead time."
- "I did find some blue areas with lower values... I'd rather see that than have nothing there."
- "A yes/no value is not the answer for something like this."
- "It would be nice to see a trend of if your CI forecast is increasing... some space and time averaging might be helpful."
- "I can see these being even more useful in RSO."
- "I was really pleased how the CTC product picked up on the bigger storms... I'd be curious to know how this would do over some of the more mediocre stuff."
- "The lead times with repect to the cooling rates seemed to correlate well to what we saw in the training material... there was one where we had 70 minutes lead time on severe."
- "We had one cell that had about an hour and a half lead time of severe from the CTC."
- "We had one cell that already had ongoing hail and then we saw an additional spike of CTC and there was additional development that eventually lead to a tornado... that was interesting to see."
- "Yesterday in Hastings we had a -34 C / 15 mins signal early on... there were some weaker storms ongoing at that time and it seemed like the stronger convection formed a little south of there afterwards... it definitely clued us in that something was going on."
- "An hour by hour verification over a one or several month period would be nice to see how these signals relate to things like trying to erode the cap."
Nearcast
- "The problem I had with this was the expansion of the 'black holes'... it came to be that after about 3 hours it became limited in usefulness... if there was some way to fill that in, I think it would be more useful."
- "It kept saying that there was an area of unstable airmass where you knew clearly the front had already moved through... forecasters need to keep an eye on the total picture."
- "I found it to be useful when I was in the HUN area... the instability kept showing up to the SE and I had some confidence that the storms would continue to maintain as they moved through the area."
- "On the boundary of the GOES-E and GOES-W domains, it would be nice to have some continuity from one product to the other." - It is anticipated that UW-CIMSS will do this in the future.
- "I wanted to see how the model based CAPE analysis compared to the Nearcast CAPE and they matched (at least in pattern) pretty well... I usually have to go to the web to get those analyses, so it would be nice to have something to compare to that. Having a forecast component to it as well was nice to have."
- "I can get used to the colors as long as there is a sharp enough contrast and they are consistent."
- "That day we had those storms in N. Mexico... that mid-level theta-e showed a nice moisture axis where storms ended up developing."
Simulated Satellite
- "I wish I could have looked at it more... a lot of the days we already had stuff going on when we walked in."
- "I think it would be helpful in a forecast office to see what the NSSL-WRF did in an easily interpretable forecast. It was pretty accurate on many occasions out to 30 hours. In this week it was very good on the initialization of the convection."
- "If you're trying to do short term forecasting it might not be so great, but when you're trying to get the bigger picture it's really great."
- "Have you guys thought about any sort of average error for the location of the storms?" - No, but this might be possible with the push to include this in ensembles... like with the CAPS ensemble simulated satellite imagery we are demonstrating in the EFP.
- "Some sort of probabilistic field might be useful for cold cloud tops are would be useful." - Again, this might be possible with an ensemble method.
- "I would use this as a quick first look."
- "It would be nice to have a 12 UTC run in there."
RGB Airmass
- "The differences are very subtle... it might be a little tricky to use in a forecast office... it would take some using to get used to."
- "It would definitely be useful in a synoptic sense."
PGLM
- "The first day in HUN's area... the total lightning was useful... we started to see an increase in total lightning and we issued a warning... then we started to see the radar returns begin to get deeper and stronger."
Overall / Training
- "It was really untimely that we would lose satellite for 30 minutes to an hour at 1800 and 2100 UTC." - Partially a full-disk scan issue and a known AWIPS II issue not being able to match GOES-E and GOES-W timestamps properly.
- "This was my third time here and I thought that this year's orientation was really good... well organized... it let us get to work right as we got here."
- "The WES case was pretty slick, I wish I had another one... I loaded it on my laptop and it was very effective."
- "I would almost like to see an abbreviated DRT-type case in addition to the job sheet method."
- "Setting up the procedures on the first day was a little difficult... when I found the ones that were created before, those are the ones I started using the rest of the week."
- "It was good having an experienced person who's been here before there to help you through what you guys wanted from our evaluations."
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "I'm going to go back to work and be asking my ITO during operations, 'where's the CTC product?'"
- "I thought both the CI products were very useful... the CI product (SATCAST), I like the idea of having the probabilities... I not sure that you really need the low ones (maybe under 50)... you weren't seeing CI with those values... There were some times where we would see some organization with some areas with low values and I started to think that something would happen, but nothing did... so I wonder if it might be misleading."
- "I think there is definitely benefit in forecasters having access to both of the CI products... I found myself comparing the two to each other a lot and gaining my confidence that something was really going on."
- "I wasn't sure how much usefulness there was over elevation (for both products)... which could be expected... you really need to be aware of your environment."
- "If you looked at the day where there were the Dallas supercells, I found it really useful... I actually warned on the CTC and it worked out well... It preceed the 60 dBZ and 1" mesh by about 20-30 minutes."
- "I tended almost to gravitate more to the CTC... the CI product had more false alarms, maybe not with the highest probabilities, but there were a lot of 70s that did nothing."
- "There was a lot of noise with the lower values in the CI product... I can easily go in and turn of anything below 50 in the color curve if I wanted to."
- "I had several cases where I would get a 70-75 on the CI and then there would be nothing on the CTC, and then 15 minutes later there would be something on the CTC and that usually resulted with 50 minutes or so of lead time."
- "I did find some blue areas with lower values... I'd rather see that than have nothing there."
- "A yes/no value is not the answer for something like this."
- "It would be nice to see a trend of if your CI forecast is increasing... some space and time averaging might be helpful."
- "I can see these being even more useful in RSO."
- "I was really pleased how the CTC product picked up on the bigger storms... I'd be curious to know how this would do over some of the more mediocre stuff."
- "The lead times with repect to the cooling rates seemed to correlate well to what we saw in the training material... there was one where we had 70 minutes lead time on severe."
- "We had one cell that had about an hour and a half lead time of severe from the CTC."
- "We had one cell that already had ongoing hail and then we saw an additional spike of CTC and there was additional development that eventually lead to a tornado... that was interesting to see."
- "Yesterday in Hastings we had a -34 C / 15 mins signal early on... there were some weaker storms ongoing at that time and it seemed like the stronger convection formed a little south of there afterwards... it definitely clued us in that something was going on."
- "An hour by hour verification over a one or several month period would be nice to see how these signals relate to things like trying to erode the cap."
Nearcast
- "The problem I had with this was the expansion of the 'black holes'... it came to be that after about 3 hours it became limited in usefulness... if there was some way to fill that in, I think it would be more useful."
- "It kept saying that there was an area of unstable airmass where you knew clearly the front had already moved through... forecasters need to keep an eye on the total picture."
- "I found it to be useful when I was in the HUN area... the instability kept showing up to the SE and I had some confidence that the storms would continue to maintain as they moved through the area."
- "On the boundary of the GOES-E and GOES-W domains, it would be nice to have some continuity from one product to the other." - It is anticipated that UW-CIMSS will do this in the future.
- "I wanted to see how the model based CAPE analysis compared to the Nearcast CAPE and they matched (at least in pattern) pretty well... I usually have to go to the web to get those analyses, so it would be nice to have something to compare to that. Having a forecast component to it as well was nice to have."
- "I can get used to the colors as long as there is a sharp enough contrast and they are consistent."
- "That day we had those storms in N. Mexico... that mid-level theta-e showed a nice moisture axis where storms ended up developing."
Simulated Satellite
- "I wish I could have looked at it more... a lot of the days we already had stuff going on when we walked in."
- "I think it would be helpful in a forecast office to see what the NSSL-WRF did in an easily interpretable forecast. It was pretty accurate on many occasions out to 30 hours. In this week it was very good on the initialization of the convection."
- "If you're trying to do short term forecasting it might not be so great, but when you're trying to get the bigger picture it's really great."
- "Have you guys thought about any sort of average error for the location of the storms?" - No, but this might be possible with the push to include this in ensembles... like with the CAPS ensemble simulated satellite imagery we are demonstrating in the EFP.
- "Some sort of probabilistic field might be useful for cold cloud tops are would be useful." - Again, this might be possible with an ensemble method.
- "I would use this as a quick first look."
- "It would be nice to have a 12 UTC run in there."
RGB Airmass
- "The differences are very subtle... it might be a little tricky to use in a forecast office... it would take some using to get used to."
- "It would definitely be useful in a synoptic sense."
PGLM
- "The first day in HUN's area... the total lightning was useful... we started to see an increase in total lightning and we issued a warning... then we started to see the radar returns begin to get deeper and stronger."
Overall / Training
- "It was really untimely that we would lose satellite for 30 minutes to an hour at 1800 and 2100 UTC." - Partially a full-disk scan issue and a known AWIPS II issue not being able to match GOES-E and GOES-W timestamps properly.
- "This was my third time here and I thought that this year's orientation was really good... well organized... it let us get to work right as we got here."
- "The WES case was pretty slick, I wish I had another one... I loaded it on my laptop and it was very effective."
- "I would almost like to see an abbreviated DRT-type case in addition to the job sheet method."
- "Setting up the procedures on the first day was a little difficult... when I found the ones that were created before, those are the ones I started using the rest of the week."
- "It was good having an experienced person who's been here before there to help you through what you guys wanted from our evaluations."
Friday, June 8, 2012
EWP week 4 debrief
Today marks the end of 4 weeks of operations in the EWP. Today we had the opportunity to debrief the forecasters on their experience here over the past week.
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- Yesterday's event over Boulder CWA... "We did try to warn on the CTC a couple times with ongoing severe to the north, the first storm quickly disappeared, but the second one was successful... we did get 1.5" hail out of it."
- "I can definitely see the utility of the products in focusing your attention on what is developing."
- "There were a couple instances where the SATCAST would have a lot of 'confetti', but there weren't any really strong signals... it really showed the utility of having the strength of signal instead of a yes/no."
- "The probabilities for the SATCAST did seem to match up with the overall occurrence of CI."
- "I may have only seen one case this whole week where the -20 C /15 mins signal in the CTC had any severe after it... I think there could be more work done to fine tune those values." - There seems to be some environmental dependance that could be playing a role in how successful the threshold values are in relating to severe weather... It has performed well over past weeks, but in some situations (like the past couple days) the occurrence of severe after a strong cooling rate may be less common.
- "I really liked that 'Ultimate-CI' 4-panel you guys had... that was nice... I would steal that."
Simulated Satellite
- "I found that the placement of convection was really good... the biggest weakness was the timing and the coverage of the storms... I see this as a 'top of the pyramid' product where I will start to get an idea of what's going on over my CWA."
- "It also picked up on the non-convective stuff (jet streaks/shortwaves) really well with the WV."
- "It would be great to get this in GFE."
- "I looked at the band difference, but I didn't really see the utility of it... granted I was more focused on the IR and WV which was more intuitive to me."
- "When we got set up, there was almost always stuff on radar, so we didn't really have much of a use for it."
Nearcast
- "I used it both as a forecast tool and an analysis tool."
- "A lot of the time this week the clouds were just too thick and made it hard to use."
- "I put the OUN WRF reflectivity on one panel with the CAPE and Theta-e products... the convection followed the CAPE/theta-e areas well... it was an interesting way to display it."
- "It was nice that you could use the GOES-E and GOES-W and overlap them to give you the complete picture... the values were a little different where they overlapped, but it still gave you a good picture."
- "It would probably be more useful in the early afternoon."
Sounder Airmass RGB
- "We ingest the other NASA sport RGB products and the color tables were so different for the airmass product that I got a little confused." - They were referring to the MODIS version of the RGB airmass, which does have some different color aspects.
- "I did look at it once and it did pick up on a lot of the larger scale features very well."
PGLM
- Yesterday's event over Sterling CWA... Had a lot of trouble with sensors failing over DCLMA and causing serious detection efficiency issues.
- "Like I said the other day... 5- and 15-minute composites would be great in addition to the 1-minute data."
- "The color curve was a little hard to see, especially for the lower flash amounts."
- "Lightning jumps aren't easily seen in the 2D gridded display... especially at 8km."
- "It would be really cool to see this over smoke plumes... we have seen some CG strikes from smoke plumes before."
Overall / Training
- It was reiterated that for some of these limited coverage datasets (ie - PGLM), it would be nice to have a map of the coverage.
- "The biggest negative was the satellite outage issue... it always seemed to happen right when everything happened." - 1800 and 2100 UTC are prime times for convection... and are also when 30-minute full disk scans occur.
- "Winds an turbulence are our biggest threats (CWSU aviation)... especially relating to non-convective weather and they are hard to pick up on with radar data alone."
- "I thought the change to having a training shift before you arrive was a great idea... it was overall very smooth."
- "I definitely felt more comfortable finding the products yesterday than I did day 1... It might be helpful to just sit down for an hour or two with someone and load the products."
- "Having procedures for the products really helped."
- "Having everything in AWIPS II was fantastic... we really got some good hands on experience with how the products will be used in the future."
- "I really liked the discussions with the developers... it really helped us understand how the products worked."
- "Having a level of uncertainty or confidence displayed within the products is very useful."
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- Yesterday's event over Boulder CWA... "We did try to warn on the CTC a couple times with ongoing severe to the north, the first storm quickly disappeared, but the second one was successful... we did get 1.5" hail out of it."
- "I can definitely see the utility of the products in focusing your attention on what is developing."
- "There were a couple instances where the SATCAST would have a lot of 'confetti', but there weren't any really strong signals... it really showed the utility of having the strength of signal instead of a yes/no."
- "The probabilities for the SATCAST did seem to match up with the overall occurrence of CI."
- "I may have only seen one case this whole week where the -20 C /15 mins signal in the CTC had any severe after it... I think there could be more work done to fine tune those values." - There seems to be some environmental dependance that could be playing a role in how successful the threshold values are in relating to severe weather... It has performed well over past weeks, but in some situations (like the past couple days) the occurrence of severe after a strong cooling rate may be less common.
- "I really liked that 'Ultimate-CI' 4-panel you guys had... that was nice... I would steal that."
Simulated Satellite
- "I found that the placement of convection was really good... the biggest weakness was the timing and the coverage of the storms... I see this as a 'top of the pyramid' product where I will start to get an idea of what's going on over my CWA."
- "It also picked up on the non-convective stuff (jet streaks/shortwaves) really well with the WV."
- "It would be great to get this in GFE."
- "I looked at the band difference, but I didn't really see the utility of it... granted I was more focused on the IR and WV which was more intuitive to me."
- "When we got set up, there was almost always stuff on radar, so we didn't really have much of a use for it."
Nearcast
- "I used it both as a forecast tool and an analysis tool."
- "A lot of the time this week the clouds were just too thick and made it hard to use."
- "I put the OUN WRF reflectivity on one panel with the CAPE and Theta-e products... the convection followed the CAPE/theta-e areas well... it was an interesting way to display it."
- "It was nice that you could use the GOES-E and GOES-W and overlap them to give you the complete picture... the values were a little different where they overlapped, but it still gave you a good picture."
- "It would probably be more useful in the early afternoon."
Sounder Airmass RGB
- "We ingest the other NASA sport RGB products and the color tables were so different for the airmass product that I got a little confused." - They were referring to the MODIS version of the RGB airmass, which does have some different color aspects.
- "I did look at it once and it did pick up on a lot of the larger scale features very well."
PGLM
- Yesterday's event over Sterling CWA... Had a lot of trouble with sensors failing over DCLMA and causing serious detection efficiency issues.
- "Like I said the other day... 5- and 15-minute composites would be great in addition to the 1-minute data."
- "The color curve was a little hard to see, especially for the lower flash amounts."
- "Lightning jumps aren't easily seen in the 2D gridded display... especially at 8km."
- "It would be really cool to see this over smoke plumes... we have seen some CG strikes from smoke plumes before."
Overall / Training
- It was reiterated that for some of these limited coverage datasets (ie - PGLM), it would be nice to have a map of the coverage.
- "The biggest negative was the satellite outage issue... it always seemed to happen right when everything happened." - 1800 and 2100 UTC are prime times for convection... and are also when 30-minute full disk scans occur.
- "Winds an turbulence are our biggest threats (CWSU aviation)... especially relating to non-convective weather and they are hard to pick up on with radar data alone."
- "I thought the change to having a training shift before you arrive was a great idea... it was overall very smooth."
- "I definitely felt more comfortable finding the products yesterday than I did day 1... It might be helpful to just sit down for an hour or two with someone and load the products."
- "Having procedures for the products really helped."
- "Having everything in AWIPS II was fantastic... we really got some good hands on experience with how the products will be used in the future."
- "I really liked the discussions with the developers... it really helped us understand how the products worked."
- "Having a level of uncertainty or confidence displayed within the products is very useful."
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
MLB: Checking out the RGB Airmass GOES Sounder product
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
Thunderstorms over our region are fairly tame at the moment, so I began checking out some other interesting products. Here is a shot of the RGB Airmass product produced by the GOES sounder. GOES-R will have a similar image. This basically takes information from four different wavelengths and combines them into one image. Reddish colors here are high PV air associated with the jet…notice the band across the western Great Lakes. Blue indicates a cooler airmass with associated midlevel clouds…notable across the northeast US. Greenish colors are thicker low-level clouds with a more moist airmass…not surprisingly, the southeast US shows this. Yellowish colors, such as over the Pacific Northwest, are low-level clouds in a cooler airmass. White areas are deep cloud decks, often over convection, like Florida and the eastern Gulf. Looping this product can show airmass movement and jet position/structure. This can be useful as a check against NWP models. I’ve posted both the RGB product (top) and the normal IR image at the same time (bottom) for comparison.
Thunderstorms over our region are fairly tame at the moment, so I began checking out some other interesting products. Here is a shot of the RGB Airmass product produced by the GOES sounder. GOES-R will have a similar image. This basically takes information from four different wavelengths and combines them into one image. Reddish colors here are high PV air associated with the jet…notice the band across the western Great Lakes. Blue indicates a cooler airmass with associated midlevel clouds…notable across the northeast US. Greenish colors are thicker low-level clouds with a more moist airmass…not surprisingly, the southeast US shows this. Yellowish colors, such as over the Pacific Northwest, are low-level clouds in a cooler airmass. White areas are deep cloud decks, often over convection, like Florida and the eastern Gulf. Looping this product can show airmass movement and jet position/structure. This can be useful as a check against NWP models. I’ve posted both the RGB product (top) and the normal IR image at the same time (bottom) for comparison.
Friday, May 25, 2012
EWP end of week 3 debrief
Well it's halfway through the experiment and we once again got a chance to sit down with the forecasters and pick their brains about their experience over the past week. We got a lot of really good blog posts this week from the forecasters, but we wanted to ask them some more product specific questions. Below is the feedback we captured...
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- Forecasters asked if they could get the CI products via LDM... we said yes, but they will have to ask the regions to get it. UAH CI is already being delivered to southern region, UWCI is also available via LDM to a few regions... both products are also available on the web (see this blog post).
- Is this product still useful in pulse type non-severe storms? "Yes, absolutely... as long as there is no cirrus contaminating."
- "The probabilistic CI will be really useful for aviation purposes since we're not looking at just severe convection."
- "There were some times when using both products at the same time became confusing because the CI would show low probabilities, but the CTC would show some strong signals." ... This is an effect of the products being completely independent of each other.
- "I definitely think running both together provides the most information for us... my biggest observation was that when the CI switched to night time mode, maybe put a threshold on the lower signals to cut out on some of the amount of signals."
- "There were some good cases where the CI would switch from 60% to 80% and then the CTC would flag the storm and we would get some good lead time on the first lightning strike... it was nice to have it all work in tandem."
- "Every storm that went severe yesterday in MO had a -30 C/15 min and every signal that strong lead to a severe storm, so it was a complete success."
- "I did play around with the color table to make it look more like radar and used it a bit, but realized that I didn't really like it... the standard color table worked really well."
Nearcast
- "That was my favorite product... it really seemed to capture the motion of the atmosphere than any of the products we had been looking at."
- "I really liked the 500 mb theta-e product... it really had a clear picture of the gradient of moisture and showed a strong push of cooler/dryer air where storms did not end up forming."
- "It really picked up on an area SE of Denver where the instability was strongest and identified the region where storms formed."
- "It seems like the colors were a little flipped, with the more unstable being the cooler colors... as a forecaster I want to see the warmer colors identify regions I should be paying attention to... red means bad in our field."
- "I'm wondering what this is going to look like in the west when the levels aren't as applicable... are they thinking about adding more levels?" ... Yes
Simulated Satellite
- "The simulated satellite picked up on some of the isolated storms pretty well all week, but the more organized things like cold fronts or the tropical system did not do so well." ... This is more of an issue of the model, not the simulated satellite imagery itself and seems to be a feature of this week only... may be due to the fact that there was some significant capping over much of the US.
- What did you think of using this versus other model fields? "It's really useful, we have to do sky fields in GFE and it would be very helpful to get this in GFE." ... Dan Lindsey volunteered to do this and was given a contact to do so.
- "The low bias in extent of high/anvil clouds was very apparent... is there any effort to fix that, but still keep the ability to keep low cloud info from the model? I think it might be useful to have two separate products, one for the regular imagery and one for low clouds."
- "If you could code the low clouds generated in a IFR, VFR, MIFR, MVFR color table, that would be incredibly useful for aviation." ... This may be more of a suggestion for the low cloud/fog product.
- "It would be nice to have more model runs of this." ... It would be hard to do so because of the computational requirements.
- We mentioned to the forecasters that this product is available via LDM and the forecasters were encouraged to contact Dan Lindsey to get the process started... it is also available on the web (see this blog post).
- "We did notice that the simulated WV was much dryer than the observed." ... This is because the band being simulated is different than the one that is available on current GOES and sees slightly lower in the atmosphere.
- "I stumbled on the band difference and I basically said, 'I don't know what this stuff is' so I backed off." ... This suggests more work needs to be done with forecasters on basic satellite topics like band differences, weighting functions and radiative transfer... a short description was understood very well, so it's not a complexity issue, it's more of a lack of required training.
- "I was using the band difference yesterday to pick out the dry line over much of OK... it was a little difficult to see because of the low clouds over the area."
Sounder Airmass
- "I looked at it twice... it was interesting to see the initiation occurred along the sharp moisture gradients that were associated with the strong shortwave troughs... as well as being very useful for picking out the jet maximum... I really love this product."
PGLM
- Unfortunately another miss this week... no significant weather within range of the LMAs.
Overall / Training
- "When stuff begins firing... I switch away from the models."
- "Any extra lead time you can give on training materials is beneficial... It can be difficult to try and weave that in to your operational shift schedule... It did take more than one day to get through all the material... I had to go through some of the material twice before I got a real grasp on it."
- "The WES was very useful to just play around with the data... the job sheets were helpful, but I just liked playing around with the data."
- "If we came in the first day and tried to cover all this material I would have been totally overwhelmed."
- "Can you condense the presentations? Get right to the point and be concise... you can provide additional written background material that we can go over later."
- "Keeping stuff off a required NOAA domain would help so I could access it at home."
- "I found that I was spending a lot of time the first two days just trying to find the products... anything you can do to have procedures ready would be very helpful." ... This is difficult since we localize over anywhere in the US, so procedures built for one localization will not work for another.
- "If you can be more upfront and tell us 'You should be looking at this product now' would help us not miss things we should be seeing... don't be afraid to interrupt us." ... Maybe have the PIs running a separate workstation and have their displays up on the Situational Awareness Display would help.
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- Forecasters asked if they could get the CI products via LDM... we said yes, but they will have to ask the regions to get it. UAH CI is already being delivered to southern region, UWCI is also available via LDM to a few regions... both products are also available on the web (see this blog post).
- Is this product still useful in pulse type non-severe storms? "Yes, absolutely... as long as there is no cirrus contaminating."
- "The probabilistic CI will be really useful for aviation purposes since we're not looking at just severe convection."
- "There were some times when using both products at the same time became confusing because the CI would show low probabilities, but the CTC would show some strong signals." ... This is an effect of the products being completely independent of each other.
- "I definitely think running both together provides the most information for us... my biggest observation was that when the CI switched to night time mode, maybe put a threshold on the lower signals to cut out on some of the amount of signals."
- "There were some good cases where the CI would switch from 60% to 80% and then the CTC would flag the storm and we would get some good lead time on the first lightning strike... it was nice to have it all work in tandem."
- "Every storm that went severe yesterday in MO had a -30 C/15 min and every signal that strong lead to a severe storm, so it was a complete success."
- "I did play around with the color table to make it look more like radar and used it a bit, but realized that I didn't really like it... the standard color table worked really well."
Nearcast
- "That was my favorite product... it really seemed to capture the motion of the atmosphere than any of the products we had been looking at."
- "I really liked the 500 mb theta-e product... it really had a clear picture of the gradient of moisture and showed a strong push of cooler/dryer air where storms did not end up forming."
- "It really picked up on an area SE of Denver where the instability was strongest and identified the region where storms formed."
- "It seems like the colors were a little flipped, with the more unstable being the cooler colors... as a forecaster I want to see the warmer colors identify regions I should be paying attention to... red means bad in our field."
- "I'm wondering what this is going to look like in the west when the levels aren't as applicable... are they thinking about adding more levels?" ... Yes
Simulated Satellite
- "The simulated satellite picked up on some of the isolated storms pretty well all week, but the more organized things like cold fronts or the tropical system did not do so well." ... This is more of an issue of the model, not the simulated satellite imagery itself and seems to be a feature of this week only... may be due to the fact that there was some significant capping over much of the US.
- What did you think of using this versus other model fields? "It's really useful, we have to do sky fields in GFE and it would be very helpful to get this in GFE." ... Dan Lindsey volunteered to do this and was given a contact to do so.
- "The low bias in extent of high/anvil clouds was very apparent... is there any effort to fix that, but still keep the ability to keep low cloud info from the model? I think it might be useful to have two separate products, one for the regular imagery and one for low clouds."
- "If you could code the low clouds generated in a IFR, VFR, MIFR, MVFR color table, that would be incredibly useful for aviation." ... This may be more of a suggestion for the low cloud/fog product.
- "It would be nice to have more model runs of this." ... It would be hard to do so because of the computational requirements.
- We mentioned to the forecasters that this product is available via LDM and the forecasters were encouraged to contact Dan Lindsey to get the process started... it is also available on the web (see this blog post).
- "We did notice that the simulated WV was much dryer than the observed." ... This is because the band being simulated is different than the one that is available on current GOES and sees slightly lower in the atmosphere.
- "I stumbled on the band difference and I basically said, 'I don't know what this stuff is' so I backed off." ... This suggests more work needs to be done with forecasters on basic satellite topics like band differences, weighting functions and radiative transfer... a short description was understood very well, so it's not a complexity issue, it's more of a lack of required training.
- "I was using the band difference yesterday to pick out the dry line over much of OK... it was a little difficult to see because of the low clouds over the area."
Sounder Airmass
- "I looked at it twice... it was interesting to see the initiation occurred along the sharp moisture gradients that were associated with the strong shortwave troughs... as well as being very useful for picking out the jet maximum... I really love this product."
PGLM
- Unfortunately another miss this week... no significant weather within range of the LMAs.
Overall / Training
- "When stuff begins firing... I switch away from the models."
- "Any extra lead time you can give on training materials is beneficial... It can be difficult to try and weave that in to your operational shift schedule... It did take more than one day to get through all the material... I had to go through some of the material twice before I got a real grasp on it."
- "The WES was very useful to just play around with the data... the job sheets were helpful, but I just liked playing around with the data."
- "If we came in the first day and tried to cover all this material I would have been totally overwhelmed."
- "Can you condense the presentations? Get right to the point and be concise... you can provide additional written background material that we can go over later."
- "Keeping stuff off a required NOAA domain would help so I could access it at home."
- "I found that I was spending a lot of time the first two days just trying to find the products... anything you can do to have procedures ready would be very helpful." ... This is difficult since we localize over anywhere in the US, so procedures built for one localization will not work for another.
- "If you can be more upfront and tell us 'You should be looking at this product now' would help us not miss things we should be seeing... don't be afraid to interrupt us." ... Maybe have the PIs running a separate workstation and have their displays up on the Situational Awareness Display would help.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Airmass composite used over N-Dakota
Forecaster comments on EWP blog...
Broad upper low, situated over the far NW US, pushed eastwards during the afternoon hours and onwards. A sharp 100-120 kt high-level jet also translated to the east over the N-C Rockies with the favorable left exit region approaching our area of interest over NW Dakota at 19Z onwards. The airmass composite image was helpful in pinpointing the position of the jet max as a sharp moisture gradient evolved (roughly extending from Oregon to Wyoming). Initiation over far NW Dakota also awaited the approach of the “ozone-rich” airmass (purple) as it overtook the eastward progressing dryline between 19-22Z, fostered by reports of surface dewpoints in the mid 50s beneath rapidly drying mid/upper levels.
The first image captured at 1900Z:
and the second one at 2200 Z with initiation already underway/building SE-wards:
Broad upper low, situated over the far NW US, pushed eastwards during the afternoon hours and onwards. A sharp 100-120 kt high-level jet also translated to the east over the N-C Rockies with the favorable left exit region approaching our area of interest over NW Dakota at 19Z onwards. The airmass composite image was helpful in pinpointing the position of the jet max as a sharp moisture gradient evolved (roughly extending from Oregon to Wyoming). Initiation over far NW Dakota also awaited the approach of the “ozone-rich” airmass (purple) as it overtook the eastward progressing dryline between 19-22Z, fostered by reports of surface dewpoints in the mid 50s beneath rapidly drying mid/upper levels.
The first image captured at 1900Z:
and the second one at 2200 Z with initiation already underway/building SE-wards:
Monday, April 16, 2012
14 April 2012 - Sounder Airmass RGB
Well, it's not quite the Spring Experiment yet, but we did have a significant severe weather event over the plains this past weekend that I figured would be a good opportunity to capture some of the GOES-R Proving Ground products that we receive at the Storm Prediction Center and Hazardous Weather Testbed. We will start with the GOES Sounder Airmass RGB that is provided to us by CIRA and NASA SPoRT. RGB simply stands for Red-Green-Blue, which is a composite image created by combining three separate channels or channel differences into one image. This technique helps us identify specific features in the atmosphere without the use of complex derived products. The airmass RGB is a combination of thermal infrared, water vapor and ozone channels that help us identify regions of warm and moist versus cold and dry airmasses, spin in the atmosphere and jet streaks. The airmass RGB has been used extensively over Europe using the Meteosat Second Generation satellite, which has similar spectral channels to what will be available on the GOES-R Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). Current GOES imagers do not contain the spectral bands necessary to generate this product, but we are able to simulate the RGB using the GOES sounder, which does have some similar channels to the ABI. Unfortunately this data only arrives once hourly from the sounder, but when GOES-R is launched, we will be able to create this product every 5 minutes over the continental US.
Below is a time-series of the SPC's outlooks from day 7 up until the event on Saturday 14 April 2012 from the SPC Facebook page. You can see clearly that the SPC had a good handle on the threat a week in advance and that the threat area depicted on day 1 well outlined the events that occurred in NE, KS, OK and IA. Preliminary storm reports from the SPC website indicate 135 tornado reports (likely will end up being about 75 individual tornadoes following official surveys) occurred during this event, with what appears to be several long tracks across OK and KS.
If we take a look at the sounder airmass RGB product at 12 UTC on 14 April 2012 (top image below), we can see a strong center of circulation over CA/AZ/UT/NV with indications of a significantly lowered tropopause, associated jet streaks and high PV (red hues) within the circulation and extending along the Pacific coast up into Canada. This can be confirmed by overlaying the tropopause pressure from the RUC analysis (middle image below) or the the 500 mb heights and vorticity (bottom image below).
If we move forward to 15 UTC (image below), just prior to initiation in KS, we can begin to see evidence of a moisture boundary (blue-to-green hue gradient) setting up along a line extending from NW KS near the KS/NE border down into the OK panhandle and down into west TX. Initiation in southern KS and down through the OK panhandle into TX would occur along a dryline located in this area, which is likely what the airmass RGB is picking up at this time.
Moving forward to 02 (top image below), 03 (middle image below) and 04 UTC (bottom image below) on 15 April 2012, the moisture gradient feature really begins to tighten up and better define itself as the dryline continued to evolve and the Pacific cold front approached, initiating a line of storms extending into central TX.
Below is a time-series of the SPC's outlooks from day 7 up until the event on Saturday 14 April 2012 from the SPC Facebook page. You can see clearly that the SPC had a good handle on the threat a week in advance and that the threat area depicted on day 1 well outlined the events that occurred in NE, KS, OK and IA. Preliminary storm reports from the SPC website indicate 135 tornado reports (likely will end up being about 75 individual tornadoes following official surveys) occurred during this event, with what appears to be several long tracks across OK and KS.
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