The three thunderstorm alerts (Thunderstorm, Significant, and Dangerous) are nice to look at, but don’t add much value to the warning process because the polygons change every few minutes.

The East and WEST ENI DTA 10 min Motion Projections are nice references, but aren’t needed for warning purposes.

The East and West ENI DTA Rates are very useful for tracking the lightning trends in thunderstorms.  However, the algorithms “jump around” too much in lines of storms, splitting storms, and merging storms.  This makes it difficult to follow these algorithms at these times.

The East and West ENI DTA Cell Polygons seem too small given the size(s) of the storms.  This leads to smaller East and West ENI DTA Cell Flash Rates than is realistic.  Plus, these algorithms “jump around” too much in lines of storms, splitting storms, and merging storms.  This makes it difficult to follow these algorithms at these times.

The 1 km ENI Total Lightning Grid is very messy and is hard to use for warning purposes.  The 3 km grid seems to be the most useful.  5 km and higher seems to “wash out” the details of the storms.  This is using the 5-minute data, that is more likely to capture the current lightning trends.

The ENI Total Lightning Plots show the lightning as points (where the strikes/flashes/pulses occurred) and as a total count for each in the corner of the screen.  It would be nice to have the capability to turn the “points” off, but leave the count on.

5-minute data seems to be the most useful for the various lightning algorithms.  With 1-minute data it’s easy to miss trends.  With 10 and 15 minute data, they don’t update fast enough for rapidly evolving storms.

Champion