EWP Blog

Projects include:

GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) Imagery, Band Differences, RGB’s, and Baseline Derived Products

Hazardous Weather Testbed, Experimental Warning Program Relevance:

• GOES-16 ABI imagery and products provide information about the pre-convective environment, convective initiation, and the evolution of mature convection.
• Evaluation of GOES-16 ABI imagery and products shortly after availability in AWIPS allows for the early development of best practices for use in convective situations.

 Product Overview:

• GOES-16 ABI single-band imagery and band differences are already available to NWS forecasters in AWIPS-II.
• RGB imagery and baseline derived products will be available to NWS forecasters in AWIPS-II prior to experiment.
• Imagery and products idenitified as potentially benifiting forecasters in convective warning situations will be the focus of this evaluation.
• 30-sec and 1-min imagery will be evaluated when available, in addition to the 5-min CONUS imagery

GOES-16 ABI Products:

• ABI single-band imagery (16 channels)
• ABI band difference imagery
  • 2 – 7.3 um (Split Window), 1.6 – 0.64 (Split Snow), 6.2 – 7.3 μm (Split Water Vapor), 9.6 – 10.3 μm (Split Ozone)
• ABI RGB imagery
  • Simple: Day Land Cloud Convection, Day Cloud Phase, Day Land Cloud
  • Advanced: Day Convection, Air Mass, Differential Water Vapor
• ABI baseline derived products
  • Derived Motion Winds, Derived Stability Indices, Total Precipitable Water, and others as time allows.

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Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) and derived lightning detection products

Hazardous Weather Testbed, Experimental Warning Program Relevance:

• Identify developing deep convection and areal coverage by observing optical detections of both cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud lightning.
• Evaluate trends from GLM in relationship to storm evolution, storm coverage, severe weather, and flooding potential along with relationships to other fields available at HWT.
• Identify product types, visualization techniques, and tools for future GLM observations.
• Identify best practices for GLM products and integration into forecaster storm interrogation methodology.

Product Overview:

• GLM beta release level 2 products (groups, events and flashes) will be available 9 June 2017 and visualized within AWIPS-II with the baseline GLM plug-in.
• A Lightning Cluster Filter Algorithm (LCFA) identifies the clustering of optical events into groups and groups into flashes.
• Time period of display will be evaluated as part of the experiment, but nominally will be 1-min density plots of events, groups, and flashes.

GOES-16 GLM Products:

• Events – single pixel optical detection exceeding the background threshold for detection.
• Groups – optical events such as individual return strokes or high current discharges (i.e., K-change). May consist of one or more events (pixel) occurring within a single integration time, including all adjacent pixels, and weighted by the optical intensity of the associated Events.
• Flash Centroids – One or more groups occurring within 330 ms and 16.5 km. The flash is given as a single, centroid point weighted by the optical intensity of the associated Groups.