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."
