9AM
Welcome to the testbed! Day 1 is usually when forecasters are just getting their feet wet with the products, but today they may get thrown into the deep end. The 13Z SPC Outlook features a Moderate Risk and large Enhanced-Slight Risk through the Mississippi Valley, driven by a 15% CIG2 threat. Forecasters will mostly be getting familiar with products and using AWIPS in cloud instances, but hopefully they will have plenty of good storms to observe today! Unfortunately we’re having issues getting the Lighting Stoplight tool into AWIPS, and it was only available online today.
1PM
We observed low level dry air from the Synthetic GXI data from a front and dry line that passed through western Oklahoma. It was interesting to compare the synthetic data from WVT and low(est) level water vapor at 5.15 µm against the observations from GOES-R in the split window difference and visible imagery at 0.64 µm. Some questions for the forecasters included how easy it was to identify features and boundaries in this clear-cut and more strongly forced scenario.
Later in the day our group also had a discussion about extremely large flashes as detected by GLM and the ground networks, and how (or if) they could be interpreted by products such as LightingCast or the Lighting Stoplight tool. Could LightningCast add lower probability contours? Would those contours add to noise and too many false alarms? How sensitive should users be to the appearance of probabilities?
6PM
