Lightning Stoplight

Last Impressions

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2026, Synthetic GXI, SZA Imagery on June 4, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

SZA

Love it! Can’t wait for it to be implemented. The amount of detail that can be ascertained both earlier in the morning and later in the evening is unbelievable. Main applications in my area would be for fog detection and snow squalls. While maybe a bit niche, the snow squall phenomenon is always a challenge. It’s a shallow feature that really ramps up in the afternoon and evening hours. If it’s too far out our radar really can’t pick up on it and the day cloud phase is often one of the best tools for tracking.

OCTANE

Continues to impress! The cloud top cooling tool remains a slam dunk for identifying cells that are quickly growing upscale. The example below shows further cooling after a decent anvil had already developed.

Image below is from the same time above 2112Z

8 minutes later the storm looks to be producing hail

Lightning Cast

Another solid product. I didn’t notice too much difference between the two versions but the parallax fix is very welcome. I personally won’t use the dashboards as I like to see the data overlaid with satellite and radar. Just seeing a chart with numbers moving doesn’t work for me. However, if I would recommend adding a sound feature to the dashboard. The only other suggestion I have is using less contours. I prefer the 10, 25, 50, 75 that are already in AWIPS.

Lightning Stoplight

First time ever using this tool but it will definitely become a mainstay in my arsenal for helping with DSS. I really don’t have a lot of feedback to give. The tool is simple and easy to use. I like overlaying radar on top of it in my procedures and I’m neutral to the idea of changing green to blue.

Geoxo products

These were neat to look at over Africa and Europe, but I found myself really struggling to use them stateside. I may need more training to fully understand the benefits of the synthetic satellite data, but I can’t see myself using it. I already have a ton of different CAMs I can look at, so I’m not sure I understand the benefit of looking at the synthetic satellite. I do have high hopes for the WVT tool though. The color table is very difficult for me to tease out what I need from it though. I tried manipulating the ranges a few times and also changed dry to brown and moist to green, but it still seems pretty difficult to pick out features for myself. What I really want is something to help me track boundaries. Jason shared a really neat animation over Africa that highlighted boundaries very neatly, would love to see if that could be implemented somehow. My end goal is I want to see moisture boundaries from lake breezes, decayed thunderstorms, or different moisture fields such as evapotranspiration

IsthataTOR

When A “Bolt From the Blue” Shatters Your Confidence

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2026 on June 4, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Today presented one of those moments where you feel pretty confident in your messaging, but then mother nature throws you for a loop. For the Red, White, and Lavender festival, a line of general thunderstorms was moving over the festival right around start time of our forecast period so this gave me an opportunity to test the Stoplight tool and LightningCast in a messaging scenario for lightning cessation.

What seemed like a pretty straightforward case of DSS messaging to festival goers regarding the line moving east and lightning threat ending turned into a stressful situation for me. At roughly 1935Z, LightningCast showed probabilities were trending downward while the Stoplight tool was also trending toward yellow and green to suggest we would be approaching that “all clear” state. See the LightningCast dashboard graphic below with the main decision timeframe boxed in yellow. So, I confidently messaged my Festival Coordinator an estimated all clear time to be the top of the hour.

Figure 1 . LightningCast Dashboard over Manhattan Regional Airport, near the Red White and Lavender Festival depicting lightning probabilities trending downwards during my DSS decision timeframe.

But then at ~1955Z, the Stoplight tool turned red again WEST of my site (while the Festival itself was under green) as the FED picked up on what I’m guessing were anvil crawlers. I was surprised because the anvil looked pretty thin to me over that area so I honestly didn’t know what to think. Then, ENTLN lightning plot showed a number of cloud flashes within 10mi east of the site and eventually plotted a negative CG barely 6miles to the east of the festival at 2015Z (see Figure 2). Talk about shattering a DSS forecaster’s confidence! It seemed to be one of those “bolt out of the blue” strokes, too close for comfort! To LightningCast’s credit, probabilities never went below 20%, with V1 even hovering around 40% the entire decision timeframe. Mother Nature sure taught me yet another lesson in humility that one cannot be too confident no matter what!

Figure 2. The Stoplight Tool plotted with FED, ENTLN and DSS range rings at 2015Z. The black arrow denotes the location of the negative CG about 6mi east of the site.

I’d like to think that in a real scenario, I would have been a little more conservative in estimating a time of all clear. But with this being an experiment, I felt a little more bold in just “going for it”.

Figure 3. A longer loop of the Stoplight Tool, ENTLN and FED products, including the decision timeframe and point of confidence ruined.

And just for fun, because I’m hooked, below is a loop of the CONUS OCTANE CTC, Speed and Direction products for a rapidly intensifying storm over Cloud and Clay Counties. Although not as seamless as the mesoscale versions of these tools, there is still a lot of utility in diagnosing storm development and strength with CONUS vs traditional satellite imagery. I’m even becoming more and more a fan of the “blues” colorscale for the CTC product (left hand panel) when plotted on the Ch 13 product. The stark contrast between the dark blues/purples against the rainbow of the IR anvil really catch the eye.

Figure 4 . ECONUS Octane CTC product (left), Octane Speed (middle), and Octane Direction (right).

Astrophage

Expanding my Horizons Beyond OCTANE

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, SPG2026, Synthetic GXI on June 4, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Took a look at the WVT data from meteosat 12 this morning on the coast of the Red Sea and Yemen and western Saudi Arabia. Can see thunderstorms initiating off the higher terrain and very high WVT values along the coastline and low values inland. This was reflected very well by the surface dewpoints on the Synoptic viewer.

Figure 1: Meteosat 12 WVT band over western Saudi Arabia and Yemen

Figure 2: Synoptic viewer data 0800 hours PDT.

Finally got a chance to use stoplight data at Miles City, MT this afternoon. The product is easy to use for the cessation of lightning over an event. I did wish it was parallax corrected though. I was kind of guessing on the images and with the ENTLN lightning data when the last lightning strikes were.

Figure 3: GOES-19 SPoRT Lightning Stoplight and ENTLN 5 minute lightning data

One way to improve the data is to use the top right color scale with the stoplight product. This keeps the color flow smooth but adding a dark red for the very most recent lightning strikes proved to be the most helpful to me.

Figure 4: GOES-19 SPoRT Lightning Stoplight Product with 4 different color scales.

Dry Thunderstorms

LTG DSS with LTG Cast and Stoplight

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026, SZA Imagery on June 3, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Upon starting the shift we had a supercell that was about 1 hr out from our first event. In operations our DSS forecaster would have immediately informed our partner that the cell (which had 1” hail report) is barreling in from the southwest.

Both versions of the LTG cast were providing a 70% chance of LTG within the next hour as well, with convection out ahead of the main supercell the heads up notification would also have included this information.

45minutes later we had our first lightning strike onsite ahead of the main supercell.

——————————————————————————————————————————

Activity began to wind down by 2030Z

An all clear call would have been made at 2100Z with the stoplight product largely vacant of any lightning detection. MRMS-10C was also outside of the 8mile range ring with little build up expected upstream. Lightning cast had also dropped to around 10%.

IsthataTOR

Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining – Satellite-Based Mesoanalysis

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2026, Synthetic GXI on June 3, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Satellite-based observations have become a larger part of an operational forecaster’s toolshed with each passing decade. Over the past 10 or so years since the launch of the GOES satellites over North America, forecasters now have access to extremely high-resolution, high-quality data. That data can be used for a wide array of potential benefits, and this satellite HWT is designed in large part to show us how we can widen out that repertoire even more.

With that in mind, I’d like to start out this Hump Day blog post by discussing one of the products that has not been featured as prominently in my previous blogs – GXI water vapor data. In essence, the next generation of weather satellites (GEO-XO) will have the kind of sensitivity that lets us really drill down into the absorption bands to see some neat stuff. That kind of capability won’t arrive until the 2030s, so for this week we are taking a look at what the data could look like via HRRR simulated satellite data.

Figure 1: WVT Ratio from the HRRR (left) compared to Split Window Moisture on GOES-East (right).

As you can see above, there are limitations to this analysis. For one thing, even perfectly initialized models are going to struggle to carry cloud cover forward given its sensitivity. And for another, models are not going to perfectly initialize.

Still, if you squint and look across the eastern portions of NWS Aberdeen’s CWA, there is an area of somewhat lighter grey feeding into the cloud band on the HRRR. This is suggestive of a potential moist pool in the region. Actual observations of this would help forecasters dominate the mesoanalysis space like never before.

Perhaps one of the most powerful uses of mesoanalysis tools came from the OCTANE speed-direction tools today. I have spoken at length about those tools, so won’t spend too much time on them. This gif just does a great job of summarizing what we might be able to do:

Figure 2: OCTANE Speed (top left), Direction (top right), Cloud Top Cooling (bottom left), and Day Cloud Phase (bottom right)

Here we have a storm on the north end of the cluster (yellow OCTANE speed, purple OCTANE cloud tops) and developing updrafts to its south-southwest. Those updrafts are occurring in an area of boundary-layer cumulus (shown well by their northeast or yellow motion in the Direction panel). Further to the east, there are clouds oriented along two axes: an area of HCRS (red in the Direction tool), and an area of stable billow clouds (yellow in the Direction tool). Knowing your mesoanalysis, this provides a tell that the northern updraft is likely to wither as it enters a stable boundary layer, which it did. It’s also a tell that further south, updrafts won’t have the same issue. As of the time of this writing, a supercell has developed out of that southern cluster.

This author would be remiss if they didn’t mention the in-person IDSS potential offered by the Lightning Stoplight tool. This has also been discussed previously, so I won’t belabor the details too much. But the ability to display a dashboard from your browser with basically a color-coded area showing how long it has been since the last lightning strike will go a long way toward helping partners understand when DSS activities may restart.

Figure 3: Lightning Stoplight in its web-browser-based glory.

Sabrina Carpenter

Overview: Week 3, Day 3

Posted in Daily Summaries, Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2026, Synthetic GXI, SZA Imagery on June 3, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Day 3 started with our debrief from Tuesday, along with a focus group activity for GeoXO lightning mapper capabilities. I showed forecasters SZA imagery near sunrise during a period of glare from the GOES-East perspective near sunset. Overall forecasters felt the cloud tops were more ‘washed out’ by the brighter visible channels, but mentioned the important feature from the Day Cloud Phase Distinction is often the cloud phase before the overspreading anvil cloud begins.

Traditional Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB

SZA Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB

Wednesday targeted the Northern Plains again, with the cold front being are only source of lift and deep layer shear that we can pull from this week. We decided to localize the forecasters to NWS Grand Forks, ND (FGF) and Aberdeen, SD (ABR), and each had two DSS events so they could leverage the LightningCast SuperDashboards.

1PM

Storms were slow to develop early in the forecaster period with a bit of cloud cover making the Synthetic GXI imagery less usable, so the product developers took both offices on a ‘tour of Europe’ showing off the Water Vapor Transmittance product from the Meteosat-12 FCI. This led us back to the states where we talked more about colormaps for WVT and what forecasters preferred. I made a display as part of that discussion. Upper left is WVT with ‘flipped’ colormap, upper right is WVT with the origional colormap, lower left is WVT with a red-green colormap made by a forecaster in the previous week, and the lower right is PWATs from the most recent HRRR run (18Z).

2 PM

Forecasters in both offices focused mostly on DSS tasks early in the forecast period, along with comparing OCTANE’s CONUS and MESO products. Additional discussion centered around the Lightning Stoplight tool and debating the ‘optimal’ color table to convey the intended actions from those viewing the product.

As thunderstorms approached the mock-IDSS events forecasters interrogated LightningCast data and discussed its applications, along with the desire to have variable ranges for the dashboard web display. We did run into an interesting case where a thunderstorm initiated over a narrow band of cirrus clouds, which may have impacted signals from OCTANE and LightningCast.

To end the day, I spammed AWIPS looking for sunrise imagery to show off SZA (thanks Justin for turning on the feed so early!)

Fog and low clouds from the marine layer along the California coast from the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB (SZA left/traditional right)

Valley fog over the Appalachian Mountains in the morning from the Day Snow Fog RGB (SZA left/traditional right).

Kevin

LightningCast and Stoplight Chart Comparison

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026 on May 14, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Today I tried to focus on the LightningCast and Stoplight Charts by comparing them. I noticed that in the case of lightning approaching, the probabilities on the dashboard went up. While version 2 in Figure 1 shows a blip around 20:15z, this was validated by a storm up to the north of the Airport which had lightning near 10 miles of the site. Version 1 had more of a persistent gradual increase which began sooner than Version 2. Version 1 would have most likely given more of a lead time than a quick ramp up.

Figure 2 represents the same timestamp as Figure 1 and shows the lightning increasing in coverage as storms approach. Figure 3 is a screenshot of the current lightning and LightningCast probabilities. The Stoplight Chart did very well with the area that the lightning was occurring.

Figures 4-6 show similar images but this time as the storms passed by. One thing I noticed was the LightningCast probabilities dropped off dramatically while lightning was still around the area. The lightning Stoplight Chart, in my opinion, handled the ramp down better with a more gradual end to the lightning.

So, it was interesting to see that both of them did fairly well ramping up lightning probabilities which increases confidence in forecasting and giving lead time for lightning DSS. However, there was a noticeable difference with the end time since the Stoplight Chart kept showing red over the area, meaning lightning was either nearby or occurring whereas the LightningCast rapidly dropped probabilities.

Overall, they both did well and they were both useful with lead/end times of lightning.

Figure 1: KAMA LightningCast ramped up the probabilities before lightning occurred.

Figure 2: Lightning Stoplight red boxes approached the 10 mile ring as lightning was approaching.

Figure 3: LightningCast showed the probabilities of lightning pretty well as lightning was occurring and approaching the site.

Figure 4: LightningCast ramped down the chances for lightning very quickly as storms passed.

Figure 5: Lightning Stoplight Chart kept lightning within the ring as storms passed.

Figure 6: LightningCast on AWIPS ramped down lightning very quickly as storms passed.

-Batman

High-based convection over western Kansas Blog Post

Posted in Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026 on May 14, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

On the last full day of the Hazardous Weather Testbed, we monitored convection over the Dodge City (DDC), KS County Warning Area (CWA). We were responsible for issuing convective warnings and providing IDSS to two mock DSS events, the Sunflower Balloon Festival near Dodge City, and the Emerald City Oz Festival in Liberal, KS.

The near thermodynamic environment over the Dodge City, KS CWA was characterized by moist mid-levels atop deep, well-mixed boundary layer profiles and steep low-level lapse rates as sampled by the special 18Z DDC sounding. The sounding revealed modest CAPE values around 766 J/kg, but also significant CINH values of over 400 J/kg. See image below.

Figure 1 above: 18Z DDC RAOB showing a classic inverted-V sounding.

While numerous thunderstorms developed across southwest KS, most of the storms remained below severe levels with several wind reports between 38 and 47 kt, likely due to the combination of the inverted-V thermodynamic environment and gradient winds. See Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 above: LightningCast V2 & Stoplight combined procedure showing numerous thunderstorms affecting southwest and south central KS.

Figure 3 above: shows the Fire channel (left) and the Fire Temperature RGB (right). Around 2016 UTC, GOES-East CONUS 5-minute imagery detected a fire south of Richfield in Morton County in southwest KS. The Fire Temperature RGB showed some white pixels at times indicating that this fire was having a strong heat signal in all of the three channels in this RGB indicating a very hot intense fire, this despite being obscured intermittently by mid-high level clouds.

Figure 4. A VIIRS pass around 2021 UTC also indicated an intense fire in southwest KS with energy being emitted in the 101 to 350 Mega Watts range.

Overall, this was a day of dangerous fire weather conditions with dry thunderstorms producing marginally severe wind gusts. It is possible that this fire was ignited by lightning. Red Flag Warnings were in effect for southwest KS and the OK and TX panhandles.

-Hurricane Specialist

Severe Weather over western Pennsylvania

Posted in DSS, Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026 on May 13, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

On Day 3 Wednesday of the Hazardous Weather Testbed, we monitored weather for the Pittsburgh CWA (PBZ), and in particular lightning and severe weather that could affect the Pittsburgh Mimosa Festival and the Allegheny Caribbean Carnival. We issued several SVRs that ended up verifying with multiple hail reports of 1.0” in diameter (quarter size) and a few damaging wind reports in northern WV. See SPC reports further below.

The main radar products that were used for severe weather decision making were the 0.5° Base Reflectivity and Base Velocity products, the MRMS @-20C, Vertically Integrated Ice, and MESH. LightningCast V2 and Stoplight V2 were also used to support DSS activities at the two festivals mentioned above. At the beginning of the event at 18Z, thunderstorms were already impacting the two festivals as seen on the Time-Series plot of LightningCast with observed GLM flash counts and near 100% lightning probability at the exact locations.

Figure 1 above shows the probability of lightning at the location of the Allegheny Caribbean Carnival from LightninCast V2 (green line) and the observed flash counts from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument. Notice that the second spike in lightning probabilities did not result in lightning activity detected at the exact location as shown by the lack of GLM flash counts. In this second spike in lightning probability, the LightningCast V2 had a small false alarm than the V1 product.

Figure 2 above shows the Pittsburgh Mimosa Festival experienced two rounds of thunderstorms, one between 18Z and 19Z and a second round between 1945Z and 20Z.

We also monitored the Stoplight V2 product to give the all clear message that the lightning threat had ceased.

Figure 3 above shows the Stoplight product indicating the cessation of lightning and when it was good to give the all clear message that activities could be resumed.

Figure 4 above shows the MRMS Isothermal Reflectivity product @-20C which often shows the most significant storms and the storms that might contain hail alongside the Vertically Integrated Ice. SVRs polygons are also shown to indicate where SVRs were issued.

Figure 5 above shows the SPC’s Severe Weather reports from Wed May 13 2026. Four hail reports of quarter size were reported in western Pennsylvania and three wind damage reports in northern WV.

-Hurricane Specialist

SPG Blog Post Day 3

Posted in DSS, Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026, Synthetic GXI on May 13, 2026 by Kevin Thiel.

Disclaimer: I had alot of internet and AWIPS issues today :-(. So I mostly got experience with DSS procedures. After IT helped me (Thank you!!) I was able to get some warnings out. I’m sorry for the issues!

Today, we looked at a slight risk out in Idaho. A relatively strong low pressure system with an associated cold front moved through, providing decent parameters for wind concerns in the PIH CWA. This event featured some initially shallow pop-up convection, that quickly blew up to storms that were producing 70-85mph winds over eastern Idaho! Very interesting setup, because the only really notable instability initially noticed was the impressive DCAPE (1000-2000 J/kg), and decent lapse rates. Was hard to notice before reports rolled in, since the storms really did not look impressive on satellite or radar.

Figure 1: WVT (left: colored color map, right: greyscale)

During the quiet period of the event in Idaho, after sending out Slack messages and a briefing slide to partners, I played around with the color maps for the WVT product. This one is based off of a WV map product that SLC uses. You can see the seabreeze move in pretty well during this time frame (lighter green = moisture).
- I sent this color map in the Slack group!

Figure 2: LightningCast Stoplight over PIH

LightningCast was great today for having multiple DSS events!
- This is an image where I made the colormap slightly transparent so you can see the imagery underneath the stoplight colors a bit more clearly.
- What isn’t visible here, was that I had the “0-10” range blinking, to help grab attention quickly.
- I also used the SuperDashboard today! I really liked it – especially when I had AWIPS issued and had to rely on desktop products more than AWIPS.
  - I oddly enough couldn’t get both events on the dashboard at the same time? Both events existed and had links. At first, it was because they started at different times because I had entered the wrong time zone. But, when both events should have been active, only one appeared. The links themselves sent to my email, however, worked just fine!

-Kelvin-Helm

EWP Blog

Spring Experiments & Beyond

Category: Lightning Stoplight