The final operations day of the testbed began with our last daily debrief session, and we talked a bit about the applications sounding information with respect to the future GeoXO mission. The forecast for today was…meh? We had storms in the forecast, but the environment during our operations was marginal for severe weather overall. One office was localized to Billings, MT (BYZ) to capture developing thunderstorms closer to the jet streak, while a second office was localized to Topeka, KS (TOP) close to a remnant MCV that was kicking off convection already by 16 Z. Both offices got two mock-DSS events again today. If thunderstorms were looking unlikely to form in the Billings CWA by ~20Z we planned to move them to the Miami, FL office. Thank you Florida for being our safety net for thunderstorms.
Two MDs were issued by SPC during the afternoon for our forecast areas, with one resulting in a severe thunderstorm watch.
With Jonny’s help I made a ‘test RGB’ from the Synthetic GXI imagery. There’s no physical basis to the RGB (yet!), but it was a proof of concept that we could do it. An example and the recipe is shown below. What features can we pull from this new imagery relative to water vapor at low levels and through the entire column? Maybe we can figure it out in future testbeds!
During operations, I showed forecasters another example of SZA imagery over California with the impacts of the marine layer with low clouds and fog. Forecasters also compared this imagery against the Nighttime Microphysics to see how long the ‘gap’ was between the two, and what features you could identify with each product. Additionally I found a case from a fire from sunrise through the lens of the Day Fire RGB.
Kevin
