Daily Summary: Week 3, Day 2 (May 20th, 2014)

What some people (including me) called a marginal day last night were pleasantly surprised with the amount and extent of convection observed in all CWAs utilized today. For a majority of the day we operated in the Cheyenne, WY and Quad Cities, IA/IL CWAs (CYS and DVN). As a supercell fired east of Denver, CO (BOU) forecasters leveraged this opportunity to look at the lightning jump detection algorithm and track total lightning on the tornado warned storm. In the late afternoon as the storms in the CYS area weakened, we shifted our product evaluation to Chicago, IL (LOT) for a DVN/LOT side-by-side warning operations session.

By splitting our operations into West vs. East, we were able to take advantage of (and blog about) almost all products brought into the experiment…with the exception of OUNWRF (sorry Gabe 🙁 ). The tracking meteogram was put to the test again today with  forecasters wanting to track multiple product types simultaneously (radar + MR/MS, etc.) with mixed results. All forecasters issued their fair share of warnings (especially Danielle!) this afternoon. The training storms in the DVN region provided quite the challenge and convection is firing like crazy in LOT right now. I think it will be hard to pull the forecasters away from their computers tonight.

SPC Storm Reports as of 8:10pm on May 20th, 2014
SPC Storm Reports as of 8:10pm on May 20th, 2014

-Darrel Kingfield
EWP Week 3 Coordinator

Tags: None