EWP Blog

After about an hour or so of monitoring the storm to the north and west of the Dallas Fort Worth CWA we finally begin to see signs of a rather mature and intense supercell across portions of northern Texas. Taking a look at the Octane Speed Sandwich we can see clear signs of a much tighter shear gradient, which from my perspective shows a clearly intense supercell.

Figure 1: Octane SPEED Sandwich valid between 2000-2030Z.

Taking a look across some of the more typical radar 4 panels I use, Mesh has become maxed out around 2-2.5 inches, the vertically integrated Ice has become maxed out on the color bar, and finally the MRMS 30 min rotation tracks have begun to perk up with this storm. So while it was outside of our area of responsibility for warning operations, I would not have been shocked if the storm was either severe thunderstorm warned with a considerable tag or even tornado warned.

Figure 2: Four Panel with RALA in the Upper Left, MESH in the upper right corner, 30min MRMS Rotation tracks in the bottom right corner, and VII in the bottom left corner.  Valid times 2000Z-2052Z.

On the mesoanywhere Day Cloud phase distinction, we can also see the overshooting tops with this supercell producing some gravity wave like features, indicating a very intense storm. You can also note that the initial supercell had split with the left moving supercell now pushing across the Red River and into Oklahoma. This left moving supercell went on to produce several large hail reports.

Figure 3: Mesoanywhere Day Cloud Phase Distinction Valid 2030-2056Z.

Finally as the storm began to push southeastwards this evening we did begin to see a weakening trend in the Octance SpeedSandwich product between the upshear and downshear strength which looks to have been a precursor to a weakening trend with the cell between 2130Z and 2230Z. Radar returns began to diminish shortly after this signature with the core of the storm beginning to collapse just as we ended the day.

Figure 4: Octane Speed Sandwich Valid between 2100-2130Z.

Figure 5: KFDR 0.5 Base Refelectivity, Valid between 2118Z-2217Z.

– Sting Jet

Without the help of a meso sector satellite in JAX, the MesoAnywhere overlaid with IR as a sandwich was very helpful in simulating a finer resolution of detail in the supersaturated IR satellite data. Having this sandwich of MesoAnywhere really helped contextualize the behavior of the top of the convection, especially individually growing storms exhibiting overshooting tops. These features are more difficult to see in the plain IR and even in practice on a regular IR/Visible Sandwich on AWIPS. I was easily able to identify that the two cells coming out of TAE’s area were pulsing up at the time of this loop, while storm tops of the JAX convection all bubbled out shortly after the start of the loop and continued on a weakening trend. After the MesoAnywhere was turned off, all the green/yellow colors kind of blended together and nothing was easily discernable.

Loop of convection decaying in JAX’s area and growing in TAE’s area. The first half of the loop has the MesoAnywhere sandwich turned ON, the second has it turned OFF.

– millibar