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. |
UAHCI along cold front in Kansas
Over the past several hours, several storms have fired along the cold front in Kansas and subsequently moved off towards the northeast. This area continues to be defined by a thin line of convergence at 2255 UTC (see Figure 1). The UAHCI product continues to indicate the storms will continue to fire along this portion of the front with a stronger strength of signal on the northern end. Subsequent visible imagery shows that the northern end of this line segment did indeed generate more convection as can be seen at 2345 UTC with the mature cumulonimbus in Figure 2. The southern end of the line continues to show strong strengths of signal, with future development likely in the unstable environment.
 | ||||
| Figure 1 |
 |
| Figure 2 |
Sea breeze along W-coast of Florida
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
The synthetic IR/WV forecast did a good job in placing strongest
activity over Florida along the W coast, where eastward moving sea
breeze probably caused strongest convergence in easterly wind regime.
Pulsating storms featured reflectivity peaks in excess of 50 dBz.
Harrison County MO CTC Lead Time
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
The following CTC image led to the issuance of a warning at 2028Z. Severe hail signatures were noted with storm at 2112Z and severe hail was reported at 2130Z.
The following CTC image led to the issuance of a warning at 2028Z. Severe hail signatures were noted with storm at 2112Z and severe hail was reported at 2130Z.
RSO mimics GOES-R temporal resolution for UAHCI
Away from the main activity occurring in the Upper Midwest (previous blog posts), thunderstorms are also developing in association with the upper low. The UAHCI algorithm has captured this development over Nebraska. Severe weather is not anticipated with this activity. GOES is currently in Rapid Scan Operations, so this will closely mimic the temporal resolution of GOES-R. The first image is from 2032 UTC with SOS values over 70.
This second image is from 2040 UTC, with a strength of signal over 80.
The last image is from 2045 with a strength of signal continued over 80. The storms went onto initiate over central Nebraska! The temporal resolution of GOES-R will surely help convective initiation algorithms.
This second image is from 2040 UTC, with a strength of signal over 80.
The last image is from 2045 with a strength of signal continued over 80. The storms went onto initiate over central Nebraska! The temporal resolution of GOES-R will surely help convective initiation algorithms.
Continued Development throughout IA/MO Captured by UW-CTC
Continued convective development has been occurring throughout IA/MO over the past hour. UW-CTC has been consistently detecting strong cooling within the cloud tops of the developing storms. The following sequence of images (valid 1955 UTC through 2015 UTC) shows the consistent nature of the detections for this case by the UW-CTC algorithm:
A fellow colleague has stated that these detections were not only ahead of the warnings associated with the storms, but also ahead of the severe watches that were issued. The two following images show the watch areas issued for the region. The first watch, which is a Tornado Watch for MN/WI area was first issue at 1925 UTC. UW-CTC had multiple detections in the MN area prior to the watch being issued in the MN/WI domain.
The second watch area, a Severe T-Storm Watch for S.W. WI, IA, and western IL, was issued at 2035 UTC. Again, the UW-CTC product had multiple strong detections within this domain prior to the watch being issued.
Perhaps the UW-CTC could aid in situational awareness for watch issuance, too?
 |
| Could not get AWIPS 2002 UTC image due to technical issues with AWIPS-2 |
A fellow colleague has stated that these detections were not only ahead of the warnings associated with the storms, but also ahead of the severe watches that were issued. The two following images show the watch areas issued for the region. The first watch, which is a Tornado Watch for MN/WI area was first issue at 1925 UTC. UW-CTC had multiple detections in the MN area prior to the watch being issued in the MN/WI domain.
Impressive Cld top cooling rate, Iowa
Forecaster comments from EWP blog...
Severe convection currently evolves along the cold front over C Iowa with Cld top cooling product showing impressive cooling rates below -65 K/15 min e.g. over Warren and Polk counties.
Severe convection currently evolves along the cold front over C Iowa with Cld top cooling product showing impressive cooling rates below -65 K/15 min e.g. over Warren and Polk counties.
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