What appears to be a nice distinction between sheared / lesser sheared convection across the Octane window. Stronger shear across SW OK producing much different appearance versus SW KS convection.  Nice quick visual distinction for operational use. The idea of a quantifiable divergence contour and/or grid would be welcome also.

Octane data from Goes west meso sector was zoomed in along the inflow region across the SW OK supercell (not our CWA but I had to look). The upper right panel is the directional component and the color scale was changed to highlight approximately 210 – 150 degree range. The increasingly warm colors represent a backing of flow at approximately 4.5 kFt. This level of storm integration (if appropriate) would be advantageous to warning operations.

ProbSevere time series plots do not sample. I would like sampling tied to the cursor as in the parent CAVE window. The element assignment within ProbSevere did cause a problem with the time series information with a storm that strengthened on the southern end of a developing line. The storm initially had a defined area for the region of interest but once ProbSevere assigned it to the larger line the probabilities became much less representative. This impacted ProbTor values which were being monitored ahead of an eventual tornado warning in the Tx Panhandle. I was the warning forecaster today and used ProbSevere extensively for my decisions. It is not the deciding factor but it certainly weighs into the decision process.

PHS model output was interesting and the Updraft Wind element was noted as something not usually seen with model output. It was viewed initially but I didn’t monitor the model output once storms developed and warnings were being issued.

NUCAPS forecasts were unavailable until the very end of the operational window. I did view the 19z overpass soundings and found the familiar  trends of errors at the boundary layer when compared to nearby surface observations. This limitation continues to impact my confidence in the product.

– jbm

General question overall, can the units be displayed in fraction form instead of with a (^-1 or –²)?  Such as m/s instead of m*s^-1?

PHS

Can temperature units be in F or even C instead of K?

Is 0-1 KM bulk shear AGL?

Could the bulk shear be in knots instead of m/s?

Can the bulk shear vectors and mean cloud wind vector (or 850-300mb wind) also be plotted?  This can help with determining storm mode. 

The PHS had storm coverage well matched with radar when simulation started.  However it was about 3 rows of counties too far north than what actually was happening.  This led me to believe that all the other data with PHS was also shifted north for what was actually happening.

Could mixed layer CAPE/CINH be added to the stability menu?  I think SPC’s mesoanalysis page defaults mixed layer to 100mb.  We use mixed layer CAPE quite frequently at our office.

Having DCAPE as a viewable product would be very helpful to diagnose a severe wind threat from supercells.

Noticed the PHS surfaced based CAPE/CINH matched quite well with mesoanalysis except for the CAPE/CINH just north of FL.  Both images are from 21z.

LightningCast

Helped maintain awareness about the overall threat for lightning, especially on the outskirts of the storm.

NUCAPS

Noticed the ML CAPE was much further east than what happened.  Of course this was from the morning overpass, not the afternoon one.

Did notice that the ML CAPE was lower than the surface based and MU CAPE.  Was going to look at a NUCAPS sounding to determine why that may have been the case.  However was not able to do that due to no data aside from the morning run. ML CAPE is on the left, MU CAPE is on the right below.

Prob Severe

Is there a way to highlight which storm Prob Severe is showing the trends for?  When I am looping the radar with multiple storms on it (example image below), I quickly lose track of which storm I had the trend graph displayed for.  Really like the ability to look at the trends graphically through AWIPS instead of having to go to the webpage to do so.

Noticed the readout only displayed above the pointer, not below.  The right image is what happened when I tried to sample the Prob Severe data.

Could there be an option to select the different fields we want Prob Severe/Hail/Tor/Wind to show?  There is a lot of data there, good data, but at the same time too much to look at during storm interrogation.

Does ProbTor calculate QLCS tornado probability?  This would help build confidence for issuing these kind of tornado warnings because the environment can change so rapidly from one radar scan to the next.

OCTANE

This helped me really see the updraft divergence of the cells.  This was in deep layer shear environment of 20 kts.  Neat to see the divergence weakening on the middle bottom cell in the upper left pane weaken as the cloud top temperatures warmed for that cell, confirming that the updraft was weakening.

– Rainman

Active CWA assignment today. Warning issuance followed by the log form entry was somewhat cumbersome and time consuming but I understand the reasoning. 

Great interaction with the subject matter experts and their insight and comments were much appreciated. 

Good discussion on the potential uses of the OCTANE data. My CWA partner mentioned constructing real time hodographs that could be sampled. This is a good idea. The mental exercise to visualize the wind profiles from the height / direction/ and magnitude data is taxing to me and I think would be too time consuming in operations. 

Developer stepped through the awips imaging method to highlight specific layer winds and I found this very helpful. A layered wind four panel procedure would be helpful. Also good discussion on reaching for storm scale signals in the wind fields and whether wind speed data bins could be higher resolution than radar at high elevations and distance from radar. An intense left moving storm during this exercise window across NW LA into far SE OK showed strong anvil level divergence that persisted for an extended period.

Screen capture of the ice machine and intense three body scatter spike that persisted for close to an hour at least. Probsevere was very good especially once the tracking element was assigned to just the primary updraft. I issued several warnings during the exercise window and utilized probsevere on each one. The time trend window is great and I hope it gets to the operational version soon.

The PHS idea of better utilizing sampled profiles seems good to me. I would prefer it not be solely validated by WRF model output. I like the idea of showing where the fusion data senses departure from model initial conditions similar to shown on  this website:   cas.hamptonu.edu/~adinorscia/InteractiveMap/FusionMap.html

NUCAPS data today  was from the previous run with the 10-12 hour forecast near the exercise valid time. I compared the 11 hour NUCAPS forecast to the zero hour RAP analysis for MUCIN across the exercise domain. There was a large discrepancy between the two. Due to convection that had spread across this region earlier in the day I discounted the NUCAPS data. In this instance the NUCAPS forecast would have been viewed as suspect and likely would not have been used.

– jbm