Category: LightningCast

Comparing GREMLIN and LightningCast to actual Reflectivity and ENTLN Lightning Plots

Posted in GREMLIN, LightningCast, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

Radar is an essential tool used across all CWA’s daily. What would you do if your CWA had the potential for severe weather but you did not have radar or MRMS? Well that is something I was able to experience today across KOUN’s CWA. Satellite convective products such as GREMLIN and LightningCast were crucial in being able to determine storm location and intensity. GREMLIN was helpful in being able to get an idea of the location of storms along with their intensity even though the range of reflectivity with GREMLIN is limited. The general idea was to see if there were any areas with high end reflectivity near 50 dbz as that usually indicated an area of stronger storms. If there were any areas with lesser values this may mean developing storms that could be checked with LightningCast data to see if it believes storm development is likely to occur there. Speaking of LightningCast it was very useful in determining locations of possible future storm development. Using the >1 strikes within the next 60 mins really helps highlight areas of potential storm development and motion. When comparing these products to actual reflectivity there are a few things that stand out. The first being a good ability to get a general idea of potential strong storms and future storm development. Both products highlighted about the same area where the actual reflectivity was located and where lightning clusters developed.

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These products were then able to do a good job in picking up the intensifying storms and their likely future location. This was shown from data taken at around 23Z.

Overall, both of these products were extremely useful and successful when it came to forecasting severe thunderstorms in a scenario where radar was not available. I can most definitely see these products being applied to everyday convective ops at CWA’s across the CONUS. The last two images show the 00Z comparison between GREMLIN and actual radar reflectivity.

– Sven The Puffin

LightningCast Miscellany over Ohio

Posted in LightningCast, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

The scenario for the Ohio/Indiana area today is pop-up convection ahead of a cold front, with a gap, followed by the front itself. The pop-up convection was already getting going when we began ops for the day, but a few cells were able to be observed in the developing stages. The main convection with the front was just starting to enter our CWA when HWT ops ended for the day.

Troy Strawberry Festival

The festival was in the lull environment between the pre-frontal convection and the convection associated with the front itself for the majority of ops today, though a couple cells did approach the festival area early on in our shift. We were still getting spun up for the day when those cells developed. It was technically a missed DSS event, but I utilized the on-demand LightningCast dashboard to retroactively look at the situation and see how the LC performed and the utility of the dashboard itself. With this event, LightningCast performed fairly well, giving an approximately 10 minute lead time between the peak lightning probability within the following hour and the first GLM flash. A few minutes of additional lead time could be tacked on if you go back to when the probabilities began to spike. I believe this rapid rise in probabilities to be enough time to quickly give the festival a call, alerting them to the likelihood of lightning within the next hour. However, not sure if we’d be able to tell them it would occur in the next 10-15 minutes.

Darke County LightningCast Progression

LightningCast dashboard plot showing the time and probability value of the peak.
LightningCast dashboard plot showing the time of the first GLM lightning flash observation.
– Loki

San Antonio Waiting Game

Posted in LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, PHSnMWnABI, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

San Antonio: broad cu field is still fighting substantial dry aloft despite extreme instability in the Great Bend region. No notable cooling or anything of note in the OCTANE data. Residual outflow boundary from earlier MCS is acting as a mechanism for a lone strong-severe thunderstorm just north of our CWA. Strong OCTANE divergence and cooling seen along the nose of PHS instability gradient with 3500+ CAPE; shear is essentially zero across this region. PHS composite reflectivity clearly did not forecast this outflow and thus the convection.

2100z: Strong-severe lone thunderstorm with very clear and strong divergence signal in both divergence field and speed fields. Rainbow signal seen in the direction field due to the very limited shear.

Orphaning anvils in the cooling OCTANE fields to the west of the primary convection suggest the PSH fields for instability are just displaced to the east at 2100z.

Nice depiction of the PHS being wrong but right at the same time. Clearly slightly displaced with instability gradient to the east, but accurately showed the single cell or two behavior that we have seen.

Impressive single cell continues as of 2130z, and some notable cloud top cooling and divergence is now seen in the cell to the southeast. Instability axis is clearly ~50 miles to the north of the PHS.

 

Lightningcast is bullish on both the southeast and south newly developing convection. Very broad contours however, possibly too much false alarm area here (?).

Broad persistent divergence in OCTANE fields in the southern cell. DHX radar shows 50 dbZ core over 30k feet within an extreme instability zone of 4000+ j/kg. Issued a severe

Large jump in cooling seen above the divergence field in OCTANE, expecting further intensification shortly in the next.

DHX Radar Divergence maxing out around ~90-100 knots as of 2150z. OCTANE cloud top divergence is generally sitting between 25-40 knots.

Double Rainbow!

Deep persistent OCTANE divergence in speed and direction, core weakening slightly based on DHX radar but still likely warranted a second warning. No signs of real weakening in any of the satellite products, but radar not quite as tall with 50 dbZ core.

-Hellothere

Application of Octane, LightningCast and GREMLIN across western Maine

Posted in GREMLIN, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

Maine has an overall weaker radar coverage compared to many other CWA’s across the CONUS. This made it a great place to test out some satellite convective products such as Octane, LightningCast, and GREMLIN. The first image shows the confidence of LightningCast in the development of thunderstorms across parts of north central Maine. Shading shows >75% confidence of seeing 1 or more lightning strikes within the next hour. This was supported by Octane, which showed increased cloud cooling occurring over this area along with large areas of cloud top divergence. What happened nearly an hour later was for the most part on point. GREMLIN and reflectivity showed patchy storms developing across the region; this was also shown on ENTLN lightning plots. GREMLIN did a great job of highlighting the stronger storms with higher reflectivity although those were lower than the actual reflectivity. The lightning plots showed large clusters of lightning, which was nearly identical to where LightningCast had drawn contours nearly an hour before. Overall, the use of all these products together in my opinion would greatly improve convective forecasting as I feel they work great together. This was once again shown today across Maine by highlighting areas with potential convective development and eventual patches of high density lightning strikes.

-Sven The Puffin

Tracking convection across DLH CWA with Octane, LightningCast, and GREMLIN

Posted in GREMLIN, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

Forecasting in DLH today was challenging due to the radar being made unavailable. However, some of the satellite convective products were able to create accurate forecasts regarding the location of storms and lightning. Firstly, looking at Lightningcast there were gradients of ~25% appearing 1 hour out around the DSS point indicating the possibility of lightning developing within the next hour. This was also supported by Octane, which was showing storms initiating to the south with early signals of cloud top cooling and divergence occurring. Around 1 hour later this seemed to mostly come to fruition, which can be seen on the 4 panel image with GRMLN data on it. Lightning seemed to be mainly concentrated east of the DSS point which was shown in lightningcast. Also these storms originated from the south which Octane began to hint on early out. Overall, it looks as if all three of these satellite convective products did a good job in forecasting possible convection without the use of a radar.

-Sven The Puffin

RADAR DOWN IN DULUTH CWA

Posted in DSS, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

Without the use of radar out of Duluth more reliance was given to Satellite derived observations and satellite derived output.

Below is the OCTANE cloud top cooling and cloud top divergence product.  You may notice in an area of moderate but increasing instability there is convective initiation ahead of the main line of convection.  However, you can notice early in the loop that there is convective cooling indicated in the south-central portion of the CWA and the far SE portion of the CWA.  Notice how in the far SE portion of the CWA there is the purple shading indicating cloud top divergence.  And in south central portions there are “hotter” yellow and tiny red(s) (may be hard to notice due to scale) pixels indicating cooling cloud tops, but with no purple shading and thus no meaningful divergence at the cloud top.  This is indicative of orphan anvils. The moral of the story here is that without radar the OCTANE product heightens your attention to the cells in the far SE portion of the CWA, and this would be where to consider SVR or SPS product release, with the activity across South Central portions of the CWA failing to produce significant convection at this point in time despite moderate to strong instability.

Further southeast however notice that there is stronger instability over SE portions of the CWA, thus the OCTANE product is giving you a result which coincides with where there is higher instability (higher MLCAPE – see SPC mesoanalysis).

Lightning Cast continued to show high confidence of lightning over the next 60 min with the linear MCS moving into western portions of the CWA.  This lead to high confidence in forecasting lightning for a DSS location (Solana State Forest) during this event.

Steady behavior with the greater than or equal to 10 flashes in the next hour.

High probability of 1 flash of lightning in the next hour, increasing then holding steady

Here (below) is the Lightning Cast and GLM dashboard output comparing the forecast to the GLM flash count.  Note: the dashboard was down initially but came back online

Thus we were able to give a high confidence lightning forecast for DSS.

Here is the GLM Flash Extent Density at the time of the Lightning Cast 1 hour forecast.

– 5454wx

High Confidence in Progressive/Weak MCS

Posted in GLM, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

KSHV radar trends illustrate a cold-pool dominated, weak MCS approaching the NW corner of the CWA. Many satellite products illustrated a consistent mainly sub-severe weather episode unfolding giving increasing confidence in the near-term forecast and expected impacts. Focus would be on any stronger individual updrafts for potential isolated severe thunderstorm warnings.

Overall, there was high confidence in approaching thunderstorms per radar and LightningCast data pinpointed the ongoing widespread nature of the convection, given several embedded impulses of GLM spikes behind the leading southeastward surging outflow boundary:

East Octane SpeedDirCTD-CTD_4Pan procedure provides more calculated parameters on top of RGB and ABI products to quickly diagnose convective strength/intensity.

The top 3 panels below (OCTANE speed, direction and Cloud-top Cooling and Divergence) identify a large-scale cirrus canopy with embedded updraft impulses.

Situational awareness was enhanced by adding on local KSHV and KLZK radar which helped to identify a SSW to NNE boundary and associated CI ahead of the main line, which OCTANE products began to illustrate (see center of each product, identifying increasing speed/directional divergence colocated to the convection along the boundary)

Given the environmental parameters, this would have been a location to examine for the potential of a severe thunderstorm warning, especially if associated radar trends (RIJ via radial velocity) indicate increasing downdraft wind potential.

– RED11248

High Confidence in Lightning activity:

Posted in LightningCast, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

There is high confidence in lightning activity with the storms moving across southern Wisconsin this afternoon into this evening.  Based on the lightningcast product shown below, there is a greater than 90% chance of lightning within the orange outlines over the next hour.

As you can see on the image below, this is a point forecast for Camp Randall Stadium, showing the same results.

-ULMCUBMAN

A Tale of Two Thunderstorms

Posted in GREMLIN, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.
Two thunderstorms developed with mixed signals between the variety of tools available. Satellite tools would’ve suggested that the southern storm was the area of interest, but the radar signature was much better for the northern storm. GREMLIN is shown below, with the GOES West on the left and GOES East on the right. LightningCast is contoured, and the probability of 10 flashes mainly favored the northern storm. The appearance on GREMLIN was much stronger for the southern storm.
When looking at the GLM RBG, the more frequent and shorter flashes were associated with the southern storm.

Looking at OCTANE, the southern storm appeared more impressive. Although towards the end, the northern storm began to exhibit stronger upper level divergence.

 

But again, if one were to look at radar, it would be readily apparent that the northern storm should be ranked as the biggest threat. In a situation involving satellite alone, I might have missed the event that did produce the severe event.

And of course remembering how significant parallax is. From GREMLIN with GOES West, my storms were neatly in their boxes, but from GOES East, it would’ve looked quite strange.

 

And despite the signal from satellite, the southern storm essentially collapsed in on itself. GREMLIN using GOES West does not seem to catch on to this fact, but GOES East has corrected to a stronger storm up north.

 

 

Kadic

A Tale of Two Storms From OCTANE, LightningCast, and GREMLIN

Posted in GREMLIN, LightningCast, OCTANE Speed Sandwich, SPG2024 on by Kevin Thiel.

 

 

This is an interesting comparison of two storms that show two initially different satellite and LightningCast signals that produce very different results on radar. The southern cell shows an initially much more consistent cloud top divergence signal from OCTANE with a more robust looking anvil shield and an above anvil cirrus plume. That aside, the northern storm consistently had a higher probability of >10 GLM flashes from LightningCast and eventually developed a far stronger radar signature and eventual severe thunderstorm. The southern storm struggled to even develop a 40 dBZ core. The animation below shows the same progression but with the OCTANE speed and direction RGBs. In this case if a severe decision was to be made with just the satellite presentation, the wrong decision may have been made (at least initially).

-Joaq

 

Finally, here is how GREMLIN handled the southern storm, which it understandably initially intruduced high reflectivity to the southern storm.

-Joaq