BOU: Another busy day for Traffic Management folks!

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

Another day…same problem…convection firing up in the vicinity of some major jet routes and arrival gates in the DEN airspace. That means traffic headaches not only for controllers in Denver air space…but for people in ZKC, ZFW, ZAB…etc. You get the idea.

Once again, I’m able to test out the Sim Sat products. Already some activity firing up along the front range….but had I come in at 0530 (for a normal shift), I could have used the Sim Sat products to provide TMU with some good information for their planning purposes. Figure 1, below, illustrates the 19z Sim Sat compared to the 19z IR (lower left). You can see that the Sim Sat products have under-forecast the convection – one of the major limitations of the tool. However – the general location and trends are highlighted very well. With the exception of the development over BOU.

CYS: Getting started

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

We have big storms as we sit. Limited 3D-VAR domain and data today. -20C is about 17.5kt as we sat down and have 55dBZ over 25kft out the door.

Cooling was earlier with our storms with about 10-15 minutes heads up for 1 or 2 of them.

EWP daily debrief 6/7

Below are some of the feedback we collected during today's debrief of the EWP forecasters...

SATCAST / UW Cloud-top Cooling
- "We had quite an issue with missing data... it wouldn't update for 30 minutes and by that point we were already behind with things." -  This is due to the 3 hourly 30-minute full disk scans that currently plague GOES data.
- "We had a -33 C / 15 mins signal in the CTC and nothing happened." - See this blog post
- "Once we tried to zoom in on a local scale and it (SATCAST) looked a little offset from the visible data."
- "Once you're in warning mode they're not of much value... you should really try to look at these things more prior to warning operations... you would need more resources (personnel) to look at these products when you're trying to issue warnings."
- "They worked fine for me until we started getting anvil cirrus overhead."

Nearcast
- The CAPE product lined up well with some of the analysis data and where the more significant storms ended up forming.

Simulated Satellite
- "It did a really good job yesterday, especially because it was run the day before... it would be nice if we had a 12 UTC run as well."
- There is interest in running this on more models.
- Sky grids in GFE would be incredibly useful.
- "They look seductive because they resemble the actual data so well."

PGLM
- "There was a 20 minute lead time between the first IC and the first CG."
- "It would be nice to see a 5- or 15-minute accumulation of the lightning data as well... when we used the 1-minute data it was hard to go back in time very far because you needed a lot of frames and that got fairly frustrating."

Overall / Training
- "I'm concerned that the bandwidth issue is going to be difficult to deal with... I want to get some of these satellite products back to the office to show people, but I have a hard enough time just loading a satellite image loop."

CYS: Loved the Sim Sat Products!

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

I am very pleased with how well the Sim Sat products performed today. This event was the first time I was able to fully utilize these tools! Based on the training…the sim sat products tended to under-do the convection…here, you can see that the sim sat OVER did some of the convection…most notably over BOU.

Figure 1: Sim Sat Forecast vs Real Time

Had I used this application in my forecast, TMU would have been very happy with me! This would have been fantastic for planning/re-routing purposes.

CYS: Awesome CI rate…going for lead time!

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

Was starting to think that anvil contamination would limit use of the CI products by this point.  However, the algorithm put out a nice little surprise.  The cooling rate tops out at -33C/15 min…which is likely the highest anyone has seen so far!  Went ahead and quickly issued a warning on it…going for good lead time…and took a chance and called for 2 inch diameter hail.  Let’s see what happens!

CYS: Severe storms now popping…and the SimSat products pretty much nailed it

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

Starting to issue some warnings now in the CYS CWA for some brewing supercells.  Took a moment to reevaluate the simulated satellite products.  Note in particular the top two panels…the simsat is on the left, the actual GOES IR image is on the right.  The model did an excellent job in generating convection in southeast Wyoming.  The timing was maybe a touch off, but this is certainly acceptable for such a highly detailed guidance product which ran the previous night!

CYS: The cap is eroding…but storms are still sub-severe. Looking at CI products

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

Working the Cheyenne CWA, we have been waiting for the cap to erode, and it has started to during the past hour.  So far, though, the storms have been tame.  Monitoring the CI products reinforces that thought.  The upper right panel in the image below shows the instantaneous cooling rate at cloud top.  Most of these have been at the rate of -10C per 15 minutes.  This is roughly half of the typical rate that one might see as a precursor to severe storms.  While the convection is weak so far, we have potential for more interesting rotating storms later.

CI products: UAH strength of signal scheme in upper left, instantaneous cloud top cooling rate in upper right, accumulated cooling rate in lower left, ice cloud mask in lower right.

Nearcast CAPE over CO

The new CAPE field from the Nearcast (top image) output is depicting a nice area of instability with values ranging from ~1800 to 2000 J/Kg in NE CO and SE WY.  This area matches well with the SPC mesoanalysis MLCAPE (bottom image) axis extending into the same area.  Forecasters are currently monitoring the area for CI with the UAH SATCAST and UW Cloud-top Cooling rate products.  Expectations from the simulated satellite imagery are for rapid storm development to occur in the next hour.

GOES-15 Super-Rapid Scan over NE Colorado

GOES-15 SRSO was called to support the DC3 campaign over NE Colorado today.  CIRA has provided us with a web link that we are sharing with the forecasters in the HWT.  The link to the imagery can be found here...

http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/templates/loop_directory.asp?data_folder=dev/lindsey/loops/goes15&image_width=1020&image_height=720

CYS: Convective Initiation and Impacts to Aviation

Forecaster comments from EWP blog...

Today is a great opportunity to test the Simulated Satellite products! I created a 4 panel to compare the sim sat products with the real time IR. I also overlaid jet routes to get a better picture of the potential impacts to aviation. One downfall to using the jet route overlay in AWIPS is that unless you’re familiar with the routes, you have no idea what you’re looking at. Maybe some day we can get a mouse-over feature with the jet routes so that the user can identify the names of the jet routes.

Figure 1: SimSat Compare with Real Time IR (lower left)

Figure 1 is the 4 panel comparison of the simulated products and real time IR. Figure 2 is the simulated IR and water vapor with jet routes overlaid. You can see that at 22Z, should the forecast be right, that re-routs will definitely be in order! I am eager to see how accurate this product is today…this could mean great things for the CWSU/FAA folks! Figure 3 is just a zoomed in 22z Sim Sat WV forecast.

Figure 2: 22z SimSat Forecast

The image in the lower right is the 10.4-12.3um IR which can help to show areas of low level moisture (yellow). As the column continues to moisten, you’ll see the areas of blue develop. Blue areas indicate a difference of zero.

Figure 3: Convective Initiation Forecast and BOU Impacts

Stay tuned to see how well the Simulated Satellite products work out!