While monitoring convective initiation in a sea of Altocumulus castellanus clouds as they moved into a more convectively unstable environment, I noticed that the GREMLIN Emulated reflectivity in Briscoe County was higher than the MRMS (GIF 1). The GREMLIN emulation was producing a DbZ of 50+ while the MRMS was showing a 30 DbZ. To me, this difference was operationally significant as I would pay closer attention to the developing 50 DbZ feature than I would the 30 Dbz feature. So far in our experiment, this was the opposite of what I had experienced and I initially thought the emulated radar was wrong. I jumped over to the OCTANE products to get a sense of how rapidly the cell was building (GIF 2). My assessment of the cell seemed to confirmed my initial opinion that it was not growing as rapidly as I would have expected given that there was not a strong gradient in the speed or direction products.
-Kilometers