Tuesday, June 5, 2012
PGLM in AWIPS II
EWP daily debrief 6/5
Yesterday's event was mainly spent familiarizing the forecasters with AWIPS II, how to load the products and setting up procedures, so active operations were somewhat limited. Below are some of the feedback we gathered during today's debrief.
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "We looked at it (CI and CTC) after the fact and it looked liked it picked up on the initiation really well."
- "There were only two cells that had advanced warning on the CTC, but the rest fell apart right after the signal."
- "Given yesterday's setup, it was very marginal, pulse-type storms... I was pretty impressed by the way the CI product handled it with cells going up all over... the CTC product really helped key in on what cell was most significant."
PGLM
- For some reason the West TX LMA data was not meshing well with the way the domain was set up in AWIPS II, so flash amounts were low and offset... we had to use an external WDSSII display for the Lubbock forecasters to look at.
- "For the limited amount we got to look at, I liked the PGLM a lot... it was very very handy."
Nearcast
- Cloud cover mostly obscured the areas of interest yesterday (Lubbock/Amarillo) due to ongoing convection.
- Forecasters really liked the CAPE product and look forward to seeing it throughout the week.
- "There were a few holes around where observations were made and it matched up with some of the meso data."
Overall / Training
- "It would be helpful to show the boundaries for the products that don't cover the entire area."
SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "We looked at it (CI and CTC) after the fact and it looked liked it picked up on the initiation really well."
- "There were only two cells that had advanced warning on the CTC, but the rest fell apart right after the signal."
- "Given yesterday's setup, it was very marginal, pulse-type storms... I was pretty impressed by the way the CI product handled it with cells going up all over... the CTC product really helped key in on what cell was most significant."
PGLM
- For some reason the West TX LMA data was not meshing well with the way the domain was set up in AWIPS II, so flash amounts were low and offset... we had to use an external WDSSII display for the Lubbock forecasters to look at.
- "For the limited amount we got to look at, I liked the PGLM a lot... it was very very handy."
Nearcast
- Cloud cover mostly obscured the areas of interest yesterday (Lubbock/Amarillo) due to ongoing convection.
- Forecasters really liked the CAPE product and look forward to seeing it throughout the week.
- "There were a few holes around where observations were made and it matched up with some of the meso data."
Overall / Training
- "It would be helpful to show the boundaries for the products that don't cover the entire area."
Monday, June 4, 2012
LUB: Day 1 – Getting Familiar with Products
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
Shortly after entering the lab, thunderstorms quickly fired up over our area of responsibility. While getting familiar with the new forecasting and diagnostic tools, we were quickly thrown into a “warning operations” situation.
The OUNWRF did a fairly good job handling the timing and location of
convective initiation this afternoon (Figure 1). Along with using the
OUNWRF, we also tested the UW-CIMSS Cloud Top Cooling tool. The UW-CTC
tool did a great job picking up the areas of developing convection
across the CWA This afternoon. UW-CTC algorithm seemed to have only
two”false alarms”, one of which being the result of some high clouds. It
was pretty easy to identify the “false alarm” as the CTC rates were
extremely low (on the order of -5C/15min), compared to CTC rates around
-20C/15min (observed with most of the developing activity).
The second “false alarm” occurred when the CTC algorithm tagged a
developing storm with CTC rates from -15 to -20C/15min (figure 3). After
warning on this storm, we waited for LSRs and never saw a report to
verify the warning.
Despite a couple of false alarms, we were very pleased with the
performance of the OUNWRF with respect to the storms becoming outflow
dominate and producing more wind damage than hail. We received wind gust
reports greater than 60mph in the LBB area, as well as numerous downed
trees. Figure 4 below illustrates the surface max hourly wind speed.
Typically winds greater than 20m/s should raise heightened awareness and
the potential for damaging winds.
Had we a little more time to become familiar with the products and get
“spun up” with our procedures and whatnot…the Convective Initiation tool
would have helped us greatly. Figure 5 below shows the CI application
combined with vis sat imagery. The algorithm picks up the CI very
nicely…this storm eventually blew up and was one of the larger storms of
the day. The storm produced very large hail.The UAH-CI application
continued to be quite helpful to us during the rest of the shift.
Shortly after entering the lab, thunderstorms quickly fired up over our area of responsibility. While getting familiar with the new forecasting and diagnostic tools, we were quickly thrown into a “warning operations” situation.
AMA: Warn on CI “miss?”
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
We have issued a couple warnings on marginal storms that did not give strong CI signals. On this image, I warned on the middle cell in Hansford County (reflectivity on bottom left). Note the lack of instantaneous or accumulated cloud top cooling for this area. We are looking for downburst winds and maybe some subsevere hail from this storm. The CI algorithms have been doing well in other CWAs like Lubbock, but may have missed one here, pending verification.
We have issued a couple warnings on marginal storms that did not give strong CI signals. On this image, I warned on the middle cell in Hansford County (reflectivity on bottom left). Note the lack of instantaneous or accumulated cloud top cooling for this area. We are looking for downburst winds and maybe some subsevere hail from this storm. The CI algorithms have been doing well in other CWAs like Lubbock, but may have missed one here, pending verification.
AMA: First potential UW/CI cell
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
Here is the first cell that is close to -20C/15 min in the AMA area
today. Expecting storms to be mainly of the up and down variety due to
lack of flow/shear. Will be watching this one to see what happens.
AMA: Convective initiation in a non-supercell environment
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
Kicking off the 4th week in the HWT at CWA AMA. Will be interesting to
see how the convective initiation products handle more or less “popcorn”
type convection beneath very weak upper flow and mid-level ridging.
Image above shows several areas of moderate to high-indication CI in the
next hour.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Tales from the Testbed Webinar
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.
Web links for products
There have been a lot of requests by the forecasters for the websites for the products being demonstrated... below is a comprehensive list for future reference.
SATCAST
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS.png (most recent)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m1.png (minus 1)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m2.png (minus 2)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m3.png (minus 3)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m4.png (minus 4)
UWCI
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/snaap/convinit/quicklooks/
Nearcast
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/model/nrc/
Simulated Satellite Imagery / Band Difference
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes_r/proving-ground/nssl_abi/nssl_abi_rt_js.html (imagery)
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/goes-r_proving_ground.asp#Synthetic_GOES-R_Imagery_from_Real-Time_NSSL_4_km_WRF-ARW (imagery/band differences)
Sounder Airmass
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/goes-r_proving_ground.asp#GOES_Sounder-Based_Products
SATCAST
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS.png (most recent)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m1.png (minus 1)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m2.png (minus 2)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m3.png (minus 3)
http://nsstc.uah.edu/~jwalker/UAH_SATCASTv2_CI_VIS_m4.png (minus 4)
UWCI
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/snaap/convinit/quicklooks/
Nearcast
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/model/nrc/
Simulated Satellite Imagery / Band Difference
http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes_r/proving-ground/nssl_abi/nssl_abi_rt_js.html (imagery)
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/goes-r_proving_ground.asp#Synthetic_GOES-R_Imagery_from_Real-Time_NSSL_4_km_WRF-ARW (imagery/band differences)
Sounder Airmass
http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/goes-r_proving_ground.asp#GOES_Sounder-Based_Products
Thursday, May 24, 2012
UW-CTC prompts experimental warning with great success in NW MO
The UW-CTC product, again, showed persistent signals of strong cooling from 2140 UTC to 2210 UTC for a storm developing within NW MO. The following images show the sequence of cooling rates for this cell:
 |
| 2140 UTC |
 |
| 2145 UTC |
 |
| 2155 UTC |
 |
| 2202 UTC (Not AWIPS screen capture due to AWIPS-2 technicality) |
 |
| 2210 UTC |
 |
| Official EAX warning text |
 |
| SPC Storm Reports (see NW MO) |
| This development was noticed by a forecaster paying attention to the EAX WFO here at the HWT. Based on the environment and the observed CTC rate of < -50K/15 min, the forecaster issued an experimental warning for this cell. The actual radar-based EAX severe thunderstorm warning was not placed until 2254 UTC, meaning with the added experimental information, the HWT forecaster had a issuance lead time of 44 minutes over the official warning (see above for official warning text from EAX)! Additionally, this particular cell had severe hail and wind reports with the hail reaching 1" criteria at 2305 UTC (see above reports). This means that the UW-CTC detection had an hour and 25 minute lead time over the observed hail report. |
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