Thunderstorms in the Charleston CWA are marginally interesting at best today so I have been spending some time browsing some parameters that aren’t necessarily severe weather related. NUCAPS availability across the eastern United States looks pretty good today!

I haven’t had the opportunity to use the pop-up skew-t functionality in AWIPS until now (didn’t even know it existed, in fact). It is a bit buried and it took me a few tries to get it to work, but this makes it a lot easier to go through all of these different points and try to find an area of interest without having to go into the occasional information overload that is NSHARP unnecessarily.

After looking at some soundings I went to explore the gridded NUCAPS data, which looks very promising. There was a slight learning curve as I had to get used to the polar orbiting satellite paradigm once again, but being able to see the data from all of the points in a plan view format can help with the information overload mentioned above. I noticed the gridded NUCAPS has some ozone and Haines Index fields. Air quality and fire weather are kind of a big deal where I forecast out west, so these fields will be fun to explore once they’re available in my home AWIPS. Seems like the Ozone Anomaly fields might be a bit easier to understand than the Total Ozone, as apparently Dobson units measure the ozone differently than something like PPM. I tried to investigate this data for the west after that NUCAPS pass came in today but a lot of the gridded data was incomplete. I suspect it was due to the lack of available soundings (saw a fair amount of yellow and red for whatever reason). I’ll take another look tomorrow.

– Earl Grey Tea