EWP Blog

I am very pleased with how well the Sim Sat products performed today. This event was the first time I was able to fully utilize these tools! Based on the training…the sim sat products tended to under-do the convection…here, you can see that the sim sat OVER did some of the convection…most notably over BOU.

Had I used this application in my forecast, TMU would have been very  happy with me! This would have been fantastic for planning/re-routing purposes.

Was starting to think that anvil contamination would limit use of the CI products by this point.  However, the algorithm put out a nice little surprise.  The cooling rate tops out at -33C/15 min…which is likely the highest anyone has seen so far!  Went ahead and quickly issued a warning on it…going for good lead time…and took a chance and called for 2 inch diameter hail.  Let’s see what happens!  CL

EDIT:  As far as we know, no severe weather from the resulting cell.  An outflow boundary from the eastern convective cells did cause the storm to flare up just before 00Z, but it so far does not look particularly strong.

Storms slowly developed along and east of the convergence boundary extending from Briggsdale to just west of Wiggins toward Perry Park.  A severe thunderstorm warning was issued at 409 pm MDT for just west of Buckingham.  MESH indicated hail up to 2.05 inches at 412 pm. The updraft was near 17 m/s at this time.  Just two volume scans later, the storm collapsed at the max updraft values decreased to 3 m/s and MESH dropped to sub-severe levels.

Starting to issue some warnings now in the CYS CWA for some brewing supercells.  Took a moment to reevaluate the simulated satellite products.  Note in particular the top two panels…the simsat is on the left, the actual GOES IR image is on the right.  The model did an excellent job in generating convection in southeast Wyoming.  The timing was maybe a touch off, but this is certainly acceptable for such a highly detailed guidance product which ran the previous night!  CL

Lots of back building. We clearly have dBZ issues or errors on the KFWS radar.  KDYS has been significantly hotter. Note a propagation effect of the updrafts and they seem to lack the stronger winds in the radar data, behind the updrafts.

Here are the propagating updrafts.

Hard to see effect in static images.

Really need SRM data. Nice little storm in our east rotating. Waited to see if MESH got hail then warned. But SRM would have been helpful.

3DVAR data has been problematic tonight. DOA.

Working the Cheyenne CWA, we have been waiting for the cap to erode, and it has started to during the past hour.  So far, though, the storms have been tame.  Monitoring the CI products reinforces that thought.  The upper right panel in the image below shows the instantaneous cooling rate at cloud top.  Most of these have been at the rate of -10C per 15 minutes.  This is roughly half of the typical rate that one might see as a precursor to severe storms.  While the convection is weak so far, we have potential for more interesting rotating storms later.  CL

AWIPS-II

is a trip.

We lost lightning data and cloud top cooling data. Workstation issues.

SREF suggests with high PW this convection is the prelude to a heavy rain event over the Red River area of OK and TX. Some SREF members show well over 2 inches of rainfall. Our event may be transitioning to heavy rainfall.

More AWIPS-II issues. Get those grid write errors and you know you are out of memory! I have become good at crashing D2D in AWIPS-II.

New cell along the line. Still using KDYS to interrogate. But if the 3DVAR 0.5km stuff was real-time using all the radars, would be awesome. It has a long lag. The updraft velocity stuff continues to be good but a bit slow. It appears to update 5 minutes while the rotation track, multi-sensor stuff updates about 2 minutes.

Today is a great opportunity to test the Simulated Satellite products! I created a 4 panel to compare the sim sat products with the real time IR. I also overlaid jet routes to get a better picture of the potential impacts to aviation. One downfall to using the jet route overlay in AWIPS is that unless you’re familiar with the routes, you have no idea what you’re looking at. Maybe some day we can get a mouse-over feature with the jet routes so that the user can identify the names of the jet routes.

Figure 1 is the 4 panel comparison of the simulated products and real time IR. Figure 2 is the simulated IR and water vapor with jet routes overlaid. You can see that at 22Z, should the forecast be right, that re-routs will definitely be in order! I am eager to see how accurate this product is today…this could mean great things for the CWSU/FAA folks! Figure 3 is just a zoomed in 22z Sim Sat WV forecast.

The image in the lower right is the 10.4-12.3um IR which can help to show areas of low level moisture (yellow). As the column continues to moisten, you’ll see the areas of blue develop. Blue areas indicate a difference of zero.

Stay tuned to see how well the Simulated Satellite products work out!