First chance to really play with the CI tool today in a  partially pre-convective environment. Attempted to grab a gif, but it moves a little too fast. I’ll attempt to write through what I’m seeing here anyways.

At the beginning of these frames the CI tool grabs onto a series of storms across far western NY around 15:15Z. These storms fire and immediately move into north central Pennsylvania Probs with these were roughly 86 to 60%. Good job.  Once the storms fire the CI tool lets go of them almost immediately.

focus then shifts south to 1745Z-1815Z where the colors on the CI then begin to resemble a bowl of fruit loops.  We even get a 91% at 1815 over southeastern Pennsylvania that is moving into th New Jersey and the Delmarva.

This tool seems very good for the synoptic level viewing…. but maybe less so on the mesoscale, as there seems to be a lot of noise above  probability of about 40%. The fact that it leaves fired convection behind and moves onto the new area of interest rapidly might make this tool more useful to SPC than to a WFO by redrawing the attention away from the current convection and towards the next problem area. This could help break a natural psychology problem where/when a forecaster would want to obsess over the current convection and may neglect other developing areas for it. .

Also I would like to add that a graduation of the color on the scale may be better than the current discrete 10% breaks built into the color bar.  I noticed that Percent probs were in increments smaller than 10%. This may help to focus the fruit loop bowl effect more. then again it may not but its worth a try.

Grant H.