Excitingly, we’ve switched over to a region that is covered by GOES-14 SRSOR, so I pulled up the visible imagery and overlaid the overshooting top detection product. Interestingly, we noticed a very slow-moving storm in south-central AMA’s CWA that erupted on vis satellite and consequently, the OTD picked up on it. Additionally, a weak but still present enhanced V was observed with this storm on SRSOR’s IR imagery.

Now to center on LUB, I overlaid SPoRT’s Flash Initiation Density product on KLBB 0.5Z and observed an increase in the initial density as a cell merger occurred in northern Lamb County, TX. This increase was evident for a few minutes and then simmered down. What’s particularly important is that the SPoRT data, since it is coming in every minute, indicated this “jump” before the next volume scan came in on radar.

In the next loop (below), I did a similar setup with 0.5 reflectivity, SPoRT’s Flash Extent Density product, and included a 1-minute CG lightning plot as well. As anticipated, flash density responded similarly to the cell merger by showing an increase.

At around the same time, WFO LUB received wind/wind damage reports in the area.

Having the 1-minute total lightning data was very helpful in being able to see the response of the cell merger and give a couple minutes more lead time to anticipate what was to come. While CGs can provide great information, having total lightning to get a better idea of what is going on is exponentially more valuable.

~Linda