While watching for convective initiation over the Charleston CWA, we noticed that the deepest convection over land started to produce orphan anvils; two of them during this loop. It made us curious if we could see any precursor in the OCTANE Speed Sandwich RGB to a developing orphan anvil. At the typical color bar range of 0-200, it was minimally visible, but as we shrunk the range, a precursor became more evident. The example here has a range of 0-75. Note the cell in the center of the screen. At the beginning of the loop an orangish reddish color can be seen just before the orphan anvil develops, then a more noticeable color enhancement can be seen as another anvil is about to be orphaned. From a forecaster standpoint, knowing anvils are about to be orphaned can be helpful to know that a particular cell is not likely to intensify and will probably diminish. Although orphan anvils can be seen with the OCTANE Speed Sandwich, orphan anvils still may be better seen in day cloud phase or day cloud type RGBs.

OCTANE Speed Sandwich loop of two orphan anvils developing.

– Burton Guster & Displar