Something I have been thinking about Monday and into Tuesday was how I can use these products for Decision Support Services (DSS). Warning! This may be long!!

In NYC, DSS was constant-whether it be onsite at emergency management centers, concerts, 4th of July fireworks or NYE, we always did it. Now, in Huntsville, the DSS may not involve as many “people” but the difference is that almost all of the activities are outdoors (think: bass fishing, dragon boat racing- not joking) AND we can get thunderstorms/tornadoes literally every month of the year. When you are dealing with large outdoor events, a severe thunderstorm or tornado is obviously important and especially one moving towards the event. But in reality, ANY lightning is considered hazardous. When you are dealing with a 20% chance of less or a boundary that may/may not form, it is critical to find a tool that can give you any sort of lead time before the radar shows reflectivity.

So I’ll give you a couple examples of how the GOES-R/ProbSvr have helped or when it could have helped a DSS event.

Back in 2011 (or 2012 I can’t remember) I was working the Black Eyed Peas concert in Central Park with a forecaster (they broke up after that-I promise it wasn’t my forecast). The concert was later and we had some scattered showers during the day but a low chance at night during the concert. But it was middle of the summer and there was a sea breeze so all bets are off at that point. At night, we had no visible satellite and IR probably wasn’t going to get deep enough to tell us much. Long story short, we may not have known anything was happening…until it already was. Sure enough, around 9pm lightning started firing in cloud to the east and within 10 minutes, a line of thunderstorms formed no less than 10 miles to the east of the concert with light rain developing and moving over the concert. So what can help? I definitely think the CI product would have given us a heads up to start. The satellite imagery products of CAPE..etc.. may have showed us where something was increasing. Also, having the total lightning product showing us as soon as the in cloud lightning started or where the density was increasing would have also given us some lead time!

Early this year, Huntsville had a huge arts festival that draws over 100,00 people in a three day period. It is usually around the time of April 26-29 each year which, is peak severe thunderstorm/tornado weekend for Huntsville. We provide onsite DSS to them each day.  On the Saturday this year, the atmosphere was prime for severe thunderstorms. All that was missing was a trigger! But we knew if the cap broke and any boundary snuck down, a thunderstorm could pop up fast…and anywhere. I definitely utilized the Convective Initiation product and seeing those probs stay around 20% kept my faith we would be ok for awhile. I could have also used the satellite based stability products because we didn’t have LAPS data on the computer we had. It would have been the best thing other than the SPC meso analysis to tell us the current conditions.

In the future, these products have significant abilities to help with DSS across the country. I obviously like Convective Initiation the most but I can see the ProbSvr model helping us predict if a storm will collapse. One issue is if a storm is coming for a concert- do you hope it dissipates and risk lives or evacuate thousands of people and the cell collapses? ProbSvr could help us see a trend and that probability as it weakens/strengthens. The same goes for total lightning- the timeseries and tracks can show us if the lightning is lessening or increasing so make a better choice for evacuations.

Lauren13