Storms slowly developed along and east of the convergence boundary extending from Briggsdale to just west of Wiggins toward Perry Park.  A severe thunderstorm warning was issued at 409 pm MDT for just west of Buckingham.  MESH indicated hail up to 2.05 inches at 412 pm. The updraft was near 17 m/s at this time.  Just two volume scans later, the storm collapsed at the max updraft values decreased to 3 m/s and MESH dropped to sub-severe levels.

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!  CL

Lots of back building. We clearly have dBZ issues or errors on the KFWS radar.  KDYS has been significantly hotter. Note a propagation effect of the updrafts and they seem to lack the stronger winds in the radar data, behind the updrafts.

Here are the propagating updrafts.

Hard to see effect in static images.

Really need SRM data. Nice little storm in our east rotating. Waited to see if MESH got hail then warned. But SRM would have been helpful.

3DVAR data has been problematic tonight. DOA.

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.  CL

AWIPS-II

is a trip.

We lost lightning data and cloud top cooling data. Workstation issues.

SREF suggests with high PW this convection is the prelude to a heavy rain event over the Red River area of OK and TX. Some SREF members show well over 2 inches of rainfall. Our event may be transitioning to heavy rainfall.

More AWIPS-II issues. Get those grid write errors and you know you are out of memory! I have become good at crashing D2D in AWIPS-II.

New cell along the line. Still using KDYS to interrogate. But if the 3DVAR 0.5km stuff was real-time using all the radars, would be awesome. It has a long lag. The updraft velocity stuff continues to be good but a bit slow. It appears to update 5 minutes while the rotation track, multi-sensor stuff updates about 2 minutes.

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 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.

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.

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

Cloud top cooling at 1745 showed evolution but it was already in place and immediately on radar.

Lightning flash density peaking over 50 flashes minute near Red River.Image 1927 UTC.

MESH got hail over 1 inch near Red River and we found we had KDYX which showed good rotation for storm along line.

3DVAR stuff with our warnings. The updraft and helicity stuff is nice but at 0.5km it is 2 time periods behind the other stuff. Latency issues abound. It looks good though, if it were only timely. Updrafts peaked 29ms-1 which is really good as we had 24ms-1 in Montanna yesterday with the hunkering supercell.

The above two images predict storm initiation at 19z. The top image is a 4-panel of WRF-derived synthetic satellite products and the bottom image is a single panel OUNwrf 1km agl reflectivity from roughly the same time. Both products show rapid thunderstorm initiation around 19-1930z. Given recent vis satellite imagery, this appears too early. Only time will tell…

21z Update:

The above products, as expected, were overzealous with storm initiation. Recent radar imagery suggests storms are just now beginning to develop, approximately 2 hours after forecast development. Still, the general area of expected initiation was correct and timing is within a reasonable window of a couple of hours.