After a few hours of ops for two of our participants on the OUN CWA, we have shifted to a domain over the Front Range.  One team is working the Cheyenne (CYS) CWA, and working two severe storms, although both storms are on their way out and they canceled the SVRs.  A new storm is coming up near BFF, but they have not yet deemed it severe.  One particular product of note has been the Reflectivity at -20C.  That team had noted that a good threshold for severe is is 60 dBZ on that level, so the teams created a new color scale with a distinct color change at 60 dBZ.  In addition, they wanted to change their MESH color scale to make the colors “hotter” across the board.

The other team is working the Boulder/Denver (BOU) CWA, which includes one storm that the VORTEX2 and SHAVE teams are working.  That team has been using a combination of isothermal reflectivity and 50 dBZ echo tops, along with three-body scatter spike signatures to help with warning decisions.  They too have also been making some changes to the colormaps to correspond to some local hail detection studies they have done at their WFOs.

AWIPS performance is tenuous today – it appears that having three or more displays running off the server causes network slowness when new products are requested, although currently it appears to be running fast.  Grossing fingers!

Greg Stumpf (MRMS Principle Scientist)