ProbTor Trends on Storm in State College CWA

While spinning up in the Philly CWA, noticed a persistent signal in the ProbTor values with a storm tracking through central Pennsylvania.

While we don't have the KCCX data at this point, you can see the persistent rotation on the MRMS Low-Level Rotation tracks.  At the time of this image at 1840Z, the ProbTor value peaked at 74%.

1840Z MRMS Display: ProbTor maxed at 74% (lower left panel). 

Here is a loop of the the storm over the last hour, with the trend up in ProbTor values.

Loop of MRMS data in State College CWA.  Notice the trends in the ProbTor values in the lower left hand image.

In addition, the ProbTor was above 20% for nearly an hour. 

-GOB

Week 3 Day 4

Forecasters today will be operating in the Mount Holly, NJ and Pueblo, Co CWAs.

-Michael

Day 3 wrap up and feedback

Day 3 of the EWP experiment was a pretty slow day weather wise, which gave forecasters a chance to examine some other products and their uses. Forecaster spent the day in Buffalo, NY where nothing much happened throughout the day. There was a brief mini supercell over Lake Ontario which showed some good rotation at times. In Indianapolis, where our other group was, they were able to monitor a MCS moving through the area throughout the afternoon and evening hours where a few severe reports were reported. Some feedback from the day is posted below:

ProbSevere

ProbTor actually went up pretty good to 14% on possible waterspout over the lake in BUF area

ProbSevere in Penn hit mostly on wind but had a TBSS and was low on hail

ProbTor helped confirm trends of low level rotation

ProbSevere picked up on the storm collapsing going from top threat of hail to a top threat of wind.

NUCAPS

Experimental soundings in BUF were really close to the operational, but showed some signal for the low-level stratus deck

Way to dry in the BUF area but temp profiles seemed okay

Providing a good temp profile would be really helpful in the winter time

Might not be quite as useful in the rapid evolving convective environment as in winter weather scenarios

Good as a confirmation of the models or not

The improved latency will obviously make it more useful

Colors on the dots should be a little different so it doesn’t make you think green means it’s a perfect sounding

Cross sections would be helpful especially in the wintertime

GLM

Like the 9 km grid better to reduce the gaps between some events

The grids lower than 8 km were not very useful with things not matching up

Haven’t looked at groups really at all, mainly focus on events and flashes

The first GLM events are usually first ahead of the ENTLN cloud flashes

GLM handled the lightning a lot better for the storms over Lake Ontario than Earth Networks did

ABI

The fire RGB was really nice in showing the hot spots especially with the 1 minute data for monitoring fire

Saw overshooting tops from low topped storms come up through the cirrus shield with the 5 minute data

Having the 1 minute data again was great for monitoring storm top trends and overshooting tops.

-Michael

Incredible detail in mesosector 1 min updates

Check out this explosive development in NE IA.  Incredible shadowing on the 1 min updates and I can't believe how much the updraft grew within 5 minutes.  All of these fine scale details would not have been picked up with the legacy GOES-13 15 min updates.

-Dan S.

Fire in Texas Panhandle

With convection weakening and no more warnings expected across IND's area, we opted to take a look at a fire that developed in the Texas panhandle.  The smoke plume shows up nicely on the 1 minute mesoscale visible channel.

Visible channel showing the smoke plume from the fire.

Fire in the Texas Panhandle using the Fire Temperature RGB (2317Z)

Fire duration was short as it appeared and disappeared within a 30 minute window, but we were able to capture the fine details within that period, where 2 15 minute with the legacy satellite, this feature could be missed.

-ISU2004

TBSS, ProbSevere, In Pennsylvania

Strong isolated thunderstorm developed in northern Pennsylvania with a decent three body scatter spike off the KBUF radar. ProbSevere peaked at 80%, but for wind, with no more than 6% for hail, before the TBSS appeared.

As the TBBS began to appear, ProbWind continued to be the primary key for ProbSevere.

MRMS MESH was less than enthusiastic, with a peak around .40 inches for hail size. Which is a primary driver for the ProbHail.

Sampled from 0.5 to 1.8 degrees, it is possible to see this storm was low-topped, with little vertical extent, but a prominent TBSS through 1.3 degrees.

Here's a loop of the storm, along with the decent response from GLM, which was more robust in coverage than the ENTLN, although flash rates were similar through the course of the storm.

Dale Doback

NUCAPS sounding plan view examined

First of all... the issue with the NUCAPS soundings is the latency in the data.  Most of the time a meteorologist will be in warning mode before they even get a chance to view and analyze the data, since it comes in on average about 2 hours after the satellite pass. I haven't seen much practical use in the non-experimental corrected soundings.   The corrected soundings did a better job with the lack of CAPE in SE Wisconsin (image 4), which lined up well with the computer models.  Where the quality control was yellow... use with caution the CAPE values were rather extreme, but that was to be expected due to the widespread cloud cover.

When looking at the NUCAPS plan view, it seems there are a lot of fields that aren't even available or show up on the map when loading from the volume browser (image 1).  A meteorologist is used to looking at CAPE in terms of SBCAPE, MLCAPE and MUCAPE.  I couldn't get the MUCAPE to load, but there was a green dot showing it was available.  It seems that the plan view is computing CAPE from pressure levels, which most likely isn't sampling the entire parcel process curve.  This is probably contributing to the lack in the estimated CAPE in most of the NUCAPS soundings I've observed.  Would there be a way to compute CAPE from the surface instead of a specific pressure level? (ideally the LFC to the EL from the NSHARP soundings).

In the second image... you can see many pressure levels that are available when computing CAPE.  I don't understand why you would even compute CAPE for pressure levels above 750mb.  I would suggest just removing the pressure levels above 750mb, since there really is no practical use for the higher pressure levels.

Testing Out the NUCAPS Cross Section

One item I haven't had a chance to play with so far this week is the NUCAPS cross sections.

While there was little to look at in the BUF CWA, I still produced a cross section for the area along line C.

NUCAPS 850mb Temp with Cross Section Line

Here is the resulting cross section with Theta-E, Temp, and RH data.  Note the low level cold air/theta-e on the left side of the cross section as it reaches Canada, where the cold northerly flow is in place.

If the data is of good quality, I could see this data being helpful in the winter time when the thermal profile is very important.  BUT, with a slight change in temperatures around 0-3C making a large difference, the data must be very good to gain support by NWS forecasters.

-GOB

Prob tor increasing, but still low

Prob tor is increasing, but still only at 5%. Decided to pull it up after we started to see some rotation on the 0.5 elevation slice from IND radar.  Clearly, we will continue to watch this to see if it goes any higher. 

This  continues to be a strong storm and we continue to warn on it with prob severe still up around 90% with GLM showing all kinds of lightning activity.  In fact, this is close to the most lightning activity anywhere in the country presently.

-ISU2004

ProbTor Values over Lake Ontario

A rotating storm moving eastward across Lake Ontario led to an increase in the ProbTor values (up to 14%).  In addition, the GLM data seem to better highlight the intensity of the storm over the ENTLN data.  Here is a loop of the ProbTor values (Upper Left).

UL - 0.5deg KBUF Radar, UR - GOES-16 Sandwich, LL - GLM 9km Event/Flash, LR - 8km ENTLN

While the 9km has reduced the blank pixels (AWIPS mapping issue), in this case you can see two pixels with the storm that never get any Event values.

Finally, KBUF did issue a Special Marine Warning for the storm and mentioned Waterspouts.

-GOB