Albany and Columbia WFO for the HWT Testbed

 The environment is mostly within northwest flow, so some decently sheared storm tops are noted on the OCTANE speed product, ranging from about 25 kts to 60 kts at anvil/storm top level.

The OCTANE Speed Product over eastern PA.

DSS for Twigs Craft Fair - Speculator, NY.

Increased lightning chances developing and going up over 50% now at our DSS site. This is a concern as people at the festival will likely need to take shelter soon as storms approach from the north. Lightning is possible ahead of the storm given the environment it is in and favorable synoptic setup.

GOES 16 GLM and LightningCAST near our DSS site at Speculator, NY.

Additional imagery with a zoomed-in view.

The overall storm top speeds line up fairly well with SPC Mesoanalysis between the 300mb and 500mb layer where speeds of 40-80 kts are noted over eastern PA and western Long Island, NY. Our storms have between 50-70 kts of speed at storm top, so it lines up fairly well with what the RAP mesoanalysis has. Very interesting. See the images below.

3:35pm CT: 1-min LtgCast has increased to ~90% at DSS point, with GLM showing ~1-2 flashes/5min.

Interesting feature on a storm over upstate South Carolina to the west of Columbia. Some weaker winds aloft behind the overshooting top of the storm. Additionally, cooler cloud top temperatures are noted in the overshooting top. Increase in PSv3 values are notable as well with a ramp up in severe threat. The storm was severe warned at this time.

Additionally, you can note the fairly decent divergence aloft at anvil level with the OCTANE direction product.

-Satellite Steve & Displar

 

Monitoring South FL Convection for the Miami Open

 We’re closely monitoring for CI near the Miami Open Tennis Tournament (location noted by the Home marker). Thus far this afternoon, the deepest convection has been in the west, NE of Naples, where the Band 13 imagery shows high cloud tops with cool brightness temps (-66C), and Octane imagery shows a good divergent signal.

So far, LightningCast has focused on the convection in the western peninsula, with the maximum slowly translating inland and to the N along the inland-tracking sea breeze.

This is further confirmed by the lightning meteogram for the DSS site. Looks like they can keep playing tennis for a little bit longer!

Looking at the storm clusters back west, a NUCAPS sounding near that cell shows plenty of CAPE.

The NUCAPS-Forecast MUCAPE confirms the high CAPE invof the storms.

Let’s see what the forecast shows for our DSS event. By 02z this evening, it shows increasing CAPE invof the DSS event. They are not out of the woods yet!

However, ProbSvr3 and LightningCast continue to provide a general idea that the strongest cell remains north and west of the Miami Open, limiting any impacts during the event.

Looking at the PHS imagery, it shows continued moderate CAPE extending into SW FL invof the ongoing convection, with much lower CAPE near our DSS event.

And the projections for 00z this evening show CAPE lowering further.

20z PHS Composite Reflectivity compared to MRMS Composite Reflectivity persistently highlights a lot of noise. Understanding from a forecaster’s perspective, this can be mentally filtered out, but at the same time, remains to be a distraction from the overall product’s use.

The warned cell over Glades county weakened and merged with other convection, and accordingly, the LightningCast probs declined. But we’re seeing new vigorous convection to the WSW just north of Bonita Springs.

One interesting note. There are new cells developing in far SW FL with lightning noted on GLM, however the cirrus canopy there is too thick to allow LightningCast to detect this convection.

- Edgar and Harvey Specter

LKN LightningCast DSS Event Evaluation

 Several pop-up storms developed in the Elko forecast area Tuesday afternoon. To provide DSS for the Elko Airshow, we looked at lightning products, such as GLM and LightningCast (shown here). There were noticeable differences in northern Nevada between the GOES East CONUS and GOES West Meso Sector satellites. This provided a bit of a conundrum of which satellite would be best to use for our DSS event. However, we noticed the trends in lightning probabilities (time series shown below) were increasing for the Elko Airport area for both satellites, so we hedged on that and blended both to arrive at probabilities. In this case, Lightningcast proved to be a useful DSS tool, as lightning was observed within 5 miles of the DSS event by 2056Z.

GIF showing the difference between GOES East CONUS and GOES Meso West products over northern Nevada.

LightningCast time series trends for Elko Airport.

- Bolt and Burton Guster

Monitoring for lightning at the Twigs Craft Fair

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

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

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

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

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