I was trying to use NearCast to forecast the environment that the storm over Denver was moving into, but was a bit dissapointed in the number of holes in the data. There was some very very thin cirrus across the area noted below that may have been affecting the low level theta-e. It is a bit of a draw back how sensitive it seems to be to very thin cirrus.

-JB

A few overshooting top detections have popped up over the last hour and they correlate well with where some of the most severe weather reports have been coming in from in IND’s CWA. I originally analyzed the OTD product with IR but found it difficult to find the detections with the traditional color scheme. After attempting a few different color schemes, my curiosity led me to eventually switch over to the vis satellite imagery and overlaid the OTD on top. The loop is below.

This product does allow a mesoscale forecaster to bring attention to a certain area. However, in this type of situation where multiple cells are erupting and multiple reports coming in from all up and down the convective “line,” I haven’t found this product to be terribly helpful if in a real warning situation. As I type this, another OTD appeared near the Warren/Fountain County lines but only minutes before base reflectivity ramped up.

~Linda

As I was a bit too late to learning how to save gif images. It might be a good idea to go back and load my “Lightning Data Warning Procedure” over a WES case to get the full feel of the process.

I would also like to add that I was also a bit late for the initial SVR warning send out as AWIPS2 is a newer platform(compared to AWIPS1) and IBW warning protocol are somewhat new to me, and forced me to add time and read through the options.

Grant H.

Additional updrafts are developing to the southwest of the main Denver supercell. The probabilities of severe, still over 97%, has been expanding to the southwest to include this new activity. This is helpful to see that your warnings may need to include a larger area. This is especially true since the storm is right over the radar.

-JB

MRMS Low level rotation increased dramatically immediately following increased velocity signature appearances.  Rotation tracks also helped show increasing right deviant motion within this supercell. 

– JRM

Have just ended proof of concept experiment.

2 severe warnings and a tornado warning were issued without (total) access to radar data. I was later informed that the lightning Jump algorithm currently uses radar for the constriction of spatial area.  Apparently there will be a satellite derived algorithm eventually that will restrict space without radar at a later date. This has a potential to be a big emergency backup procedure for use when radar goes down.

The tornado warning was a lesser chance out in the middle of nowhere  for being issued as I requested internet streaming or live cam to get some kind of view underneath the storm for the warning based off of storm enviornment and Super Rapid Scan Satellite  boundary seen feeding into the storm.

Grant H.

Post Edit: Just wanted to add a picture from super rapid scan on the boundary the storm appeared to be riding.

The 18Z vLaps initiated with the one cell but unfortunately did not produce the cluster of storms that developed across central Indiana behind the original one (upper left).  You can see the Maximum base reflectivity (upper right) also produces some convection too far south and west.  The surface simulated brightness temperature (bottom left) shows the one storm but doesn’t account for the other ones as you can see on the actual IR Satellite image (bottom right).  We will see if the 19z run does better!

Below, I overlaid IR satellite with the NSSL-WRF simulated IR imagery and there seems to be a spatial difference in the placement of the building convection across central Indiana. If you adjust for this, the product is otherwise trustworthy and allows for me to gain confidence in using it for forecasting in the near-term. With that being said and given the environment, it appears that these smaller clusters of storms will coagulate into an overall larger, mutlicellular convective event that will continue to drop south and east throughout the afternoon/evening.

~Linda

I normally really lean on the Prob Severe product and think it is useful.  However, today with all the storms popping up, I found it more difficult to differentiate which cell I should be looking at more intensely for severe criteria. ~Vollmar

Storm in Champaign County OH gained supercelluar structure and showed signs of low level rotation on velocity.  However, I kept the warning as a severe warning because MRMS low level rotation tracks never seemed to indicate strong low level rotation (at least as of 2010Z).  I wrote up tornado warning text when area of interest was north of the town of St. Paris but had yet to issue the TOR.