Today was a very marginal day as a majority of the CWA was covered in cirrus and then later anvils from nearby thunderstorms. This inhibited much of the solar heating potential with the exception of a small corridor from Lake Charles to Lafayette along I-10. The thermodynamics was not impressive across the area with only 1000 to 2000 j/kg of CAPE. Much of the convective initiation relied on a weak cold front and a sea breeze. There were some thunderstorm complexes that had moved through the area which brought lightning concerns to our two DSS points. Towards the end of the afternoon we were finally seeing convective initiation along the cold front.

With clouds contaminating many of the satellite products, today was mainly focused on lightning cast, lightning stoplight, and seeing how they interact with each other. We found some issues with the stoplight product today. The stoplight product was putting an active grid box that was not co-located with the lightning strike that reported from the lightning detection system. In the image below there is a small purple cross outside of the lone red box.

Final thoughts:

Every product we worked with this week has potential to make an impact. From extending daylight rgb products using a solar zenith adjustment, to using lightning cast and lightning stoplight to help make DSS decisions. OCTANE is a massive improvement for helping to forecast the state of convection. While there are limiting factors like clouds, overall the product could quickly make an impact diagnosing convection and being able to see how correct the models are handling the shear profile. The 0.91 and 5.95 products when operational could be used as ground truth in order to identify the boundaries, and being able to compare that with the models will help with getting those first few storms correct.

-Blizzard

Started off the day with a cold front moving north towards the Louisiana coast. As discussed previously, GeoXO products don’t do as well with an already cloudy area, however we were able to clearly pick out where the cold front was over the gulf using the 5.15 imagery. Beyond this, I did not use this product again for ops.

Figure 1: GeoXI Imagery on top, GOES imagery on bottom

When looking at the Day Cloud Phase Distinction around 1830Z, I noticed the SZA imagery was much easier to view in terms of picking out cloud top textures vs the MesoAnywhere imagery. On the same topic of SZA, we got to see SZA really shine by looking at an area of bubbling convection that occurred around sunrise. The difference SZA made was just remarkable. In real time operations, I would’ve viewed the SZA imagery for at least 45 minutes, maybe longer, compared to what we typically use.

Figure 2: MesoAnywhere (left), SZA added (right)

Applied the Stoplight product in AWIPS today, really enjoyed using that with the Earth Networks lightning and GLM. I did observe some spatial difference between the desktop version and the version in AWIPS. I realize this could be because I approximated the range ring in the desktop viewer since there is no lat/lon input option.

Figure 3: Stoplight Desktop (left), Stoplight AWIPS (right) – 1 minute apart timestamped 18:49 and 18:50 Z, respectively

I also observed that the Stoplight expanded in coverage once storms got stronger, which increased my confidence in using this product to assist decision markers. There was a substantial jump in lightning activity highlighted by all of the lightning products, and Stoplight’s footprint expanded in response.

Figure 4: 18:41Z (left), 19:11Z (right)

LightningCast also did a great job picking up lightning potential before seeing evidence of cloud top cooling.

Figure 5: LightningCast probabilities

Finally, there were numerous cirrus clouds/anvil debris over our CWA, so we did have a more difficult timing utilizing some of the OCTANE products, but I did want to highlight that the CTC product detected areas of cooling along a boundary that was pushing away from the complex of storms into an area not obscured with anvil debris. CTC also showed the core areas of the storm where more rapid cooling was occurring.

Figure 6: OCTANE CONUS Cloud Top Cooling

-simoom

Got a little more time in with both LightningCast and Stoplight today being over RLX’s area. Learned today that you can add range rings in the Stoplight product. Kelley walked us through how to make adjustments to our display, such as changing the basemap and adding overlays if preferred. Feedback: One thing I noticed while using Stoplight today was I changed tabs for a little bit, came back and noticed that most of the pixels had disappeared. However when I zoomed out some, they re-appeared. I gave an early “all clear” because of this. Granted lightning was definitely on the downward trend, but once I zoomed out and the pixel repopulated, it repopulated within the 10-mile radius. Not sure what happened there if it was user error or what. Also not sure if this is something that can be added or not, but the ability to input a lat/lon would be awesome!

LightningCast: LightningCast did a really great job today, especially V2 with the ABI+MRMS. We observed that this version detected lightning much earlier over eastern Pennsylvania compared to V1. Our storms were more low-topped with much less instability, and we saw LightningCast pick up on the probabilities very quickly even when there was hardly a radar echo. The biggest feedback from today’s session was a lack of GLM data appearing in the Super Dashboard even though GLM data was directly over our DSS event in AWIPS. Lena explained that there are different GLM sources, and since my group was using density, that’s why it wasn’t showing up in the dashboard (at least I think that was the reason?) Regardless, we shared the feedback that it would be nice if those things matched to prevent confusion for the forecaster. On the plus side – I learned even more about GLM today!

OCTANE– Since we were in an area with lower instability, Jason recommended viewing CONUS OCTANE Speed as shear was good in the area. I was amazed at how well this product highlighted the convection. At a quiet point, we jumped down to Texas to observe the firing supercells in the SW, and noticed OCTANE had cooling cloud tops around 5 minutes before lightning cast picked up on it, so that was also an interesting observation. I continue to really, really enjoy using the CTC product with LightningCast overlaid. I would integrate this today into my normal every day DSS procedures in AWIPS if I could.

Figure 1: OCTANE CONUS Speed over WFO RLX

SZA played a huge role today, too, in helping me see the clouds at a higher brightness for a longer time than I normally would! The images below are just down right impressive. I don’t know any forecaster who wouldn’t want more time to have better visualization on satellite.

Figure 2: Pictured left: OCTANE Meso (no SZA), pictured right: OCTANE CONUS (with SZA) at the same time of 22:37Z

I had a harder time using GXI imagery today given all of the cloud cover already in place at the start of ops. It was difficult to make out areas of moisture on the 0.91. However I was still able to pick up on better areas of moisture with the 5.15

Figure 3: GXI imagery at 18Z focusing over WFO RLX

Just to add: Graphic created today for DSSm posted in Slack.

-simoom