Category: SZA Imagery

Cirrus over I-10 Cold Front, Cirrus, Anvils: Lake Charles, LA

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

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

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Final Ops Day – LCH

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

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

Tags: None

Thursday HWT …the last operational day…

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

FYI: The image above shows my LightningCast forecast setup on my AWIPS workstation at NWS Pueblo. All Ltg data plots in the upper left, and the lightningcast is in the upper right. I prefer lightningcast as an image (vs contours), as the image shows ALL of the probabilities.

Today we are tasked with both IDSS and Warnings for the Austin TX area. I have been doing warnings while my colleague Nick has been doing DSS (2 sites). Once again Lena picked two excellent sites as the strongest of the day went right over the 2 DSS sites. As the storm approached the first DSS site, it intensified, and I decided to issue a warning based on subtle cloud top cooling, the gradient with the storm and the MRMS trends in hail size. At the time I issued the warning a 1 inch hail report came in.

Late yesterday, Kevin was able to put Stoplight in the AWIPS instances. During luchbreak today, I was able to create a procedure which married the ltg stoplight product with LightngCast. We used this today for our DSS. As mentioned earlier, Nick was taking care of the IDSS so I did not look at the ltg data as much as I wanted to. Below is a loop of the data and the storm we were warning for….

Image above…the married “ltg cast” and “ltg stoplight” (upper left panel).The marginal severe storm (vcnty Austin)  is in the lower right image. I really like the fact that we can marry the two lightning products into one (unfortunately, this can only be done cleanly with AWIPS, although it may be doable within the GR environment (but would be really cluttered))

Just some thoughts…A lot of the ltg data above is based primarily off of the GLM. The GLM has an exaggerated footprint of 8 x 8 km. Hopefully, with the new ltg mapper which will eventually come on line in several years will have a smaller footprint. Based on the way things are now, We are likely “overwarning” for the lightning threat when we do DSS based off of  ltg stoplight and LightningCast.

Some more thoughts, with the HWT ending tomorrow, the most obvious product that needs to be put into operations in the SZA sat pix products. THE SZA has the biggest bang for the buck and should be easily do-able (but I am no AWIPS software expert). The lightning products (Ltgcast and Stoplight) are also very valuable tools, but need to be simplified as these tools are not ready for public consumption (even though they are public facing). The OCTANE products are impressive, but need alot of work before they are placed into AWIPS (The OCTANE site on the CIRA website is the place to go to see this data the best.

Here are some suggestions on making things a bit easier for the forecasters for the next HWT:

Have IDSS parameters defined ahead of time, i.e., ‘For IDSS point A, wind criteria is 40 mph, any lightning, any hail. Let us know if any of these parameters get within 10 miles of my IDSS Site. Once the weather threat is 10 miles outside my circle, let me know”. In a nutshell, pretend you are the emergency manager for that site.

Set up AWIPS so it defaults with the maps of the CWAs, cities, county names already plotted. Make sure the density and magnifications are appropriate.

A 4 panel radar display of R/SRM would help. Set this up for all radars that will be used on this day. See below for a good display setup

I think it would be better if the teams were either doing IDSS or Warnings, but not both at once. That way we can work together and learn (bounce ideas off each other in realtime). If one is doing IDSS and the other is doing warnings we really can’t share knowledge amongst ourselves (we are too focused on our separate responsibilities).

Some last second things….we noticed that ltg cast was having issues of not detecting lightning in Colorado….

 

-Mesovortex

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Overview: Week 1, Day 4

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

10 AM

Day 4 kicked off with another debrief session, with considerable focus on LightningCast and Lightning Stoplight for decision support. Near the end of the operations period yesterday we got the Lightning Stoplight tool into the HWT’s AWIPS-II instances (thanks to Justin, Jonny, Roger, Kris, and the rest of the Stoplight team for the hard work to get that done!). We talked about what products in AWIPS-II you could display with it, and some forecasters preferred to have the lightning information (GLM, ENTLN) while others didn’t. I’m hoping another day with DSS will better inform forecasters of these products, and using OCTANE and Synthetic GXI imagery in marginal/messy environments.

Picking our WFO locations was a bit easier today, but it was unfortunately from how limited the areas for convection were. A cold front had washed out much of the moisture and instability down to the Gulf Coast, leaving us with marginal convection from the 13 Z SPC outlook. You know it’s a meager setup when we had to request an ABI MESO domain for our area, and we were glad the SAB approved. We settled for Lake Charles, LA (LCH) and returned to San Antonio (EWX) in hopes of getting some semi-discrete convection in each. Both offices were again given two DSS events and encouraged to use the LightningCast Super Dashboards.

1PM

Operations kicked off and forecasters spent a good bit of time playing with LightningCast and the Lightning Stoplight tool together, and providing feedback to both sets of developers. Working with forecasters and developers, we made a few ‘flavors’ of the Stoplight tool in AWIPS by modifying the colorbar. Here’s the descriptions from the animation below:

  • Top left is default
  • Top right colors the flashes in the last minute as dark red
  • Bottom left changes the green to blue
  • Bottom right colors the flashes in the last minute as pink followed by a red, orange, yellow scheme

Forecasters had a positive response to the top right panel, and said that coloring the 0-1 minute flashes from GLM and ENTLN dark red in some ways removed the need to overlay those products in AWIPS, simplifying their display. I saved this display off as a procedure and hope to show future weeks and get their feedback too.

3 PM

The Synthetic GXI folks decided to show the forecasters WVT data from the METEOSAT-12 FCI, since it has the 0.91 µm band that GXI plans to add. Features such as fronts and low level moisture boundaries were identified and discussed.

4PM

We found an interesting case of CI near the Lake Charles, LA CWA, with anvil debris from upstream convection obscuring the convection from visible and infrared satellite imagery. The OCTANE cloud top cooling product had a hard time showing cooling until the updraft produced its first lightning. LightningCast v2 and v1 were also compared for their performance in this challenging scenario.

5PM
To end the day I went back and made another animation of the SZA product. This time I got sunrise over the CONUS (thanks Justin!) and showed some early morning convection across central TX, with a different cloud types and layers.

Even in the MRGL, we still had a full day!

-Kevin

Tags: None

Lots of Lightning

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

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

Tags: None

Overview: Week 1, Day 3

Posted in Daily Summaries, Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026, SZA Imagery on by Kevin Thiel.

10AM

Day three kicked off with a loaded discussion, with OCTANE, Synthetic GXI Imagery, and the Lightning Stoplight Tool taking center stage. One interesting topic came from the presentation of Lightning Stoplight, and how to interpret regions with no data next to pixels in the 0-10 minute range (red). Would a site manager interpret that area as ‘safe’? This also led into a discussion on how forecasters would present these data to partners, with most in the group stating that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving the Lightning Stoplight or LightningCast tools to EMs without considerable on-site guidance or training.

The forecast discussion was split four ways between Texas, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Colorado. We ended up going to the San Antonio, TX (EWX) office for a supercell and large hail threat, and the Charleston, WV (RLX) office for widely scattered convection with a marginal wind and hail threat. Forecast groups were also now tasked with two mock-DSS events, forcing them to monitor multiple events on the LightningCast superdashboard product. The Lightning Stoplight tool was not in AWIPS until 21 Z, but forecasters were advised to use the web display from NASA SPoRT.

1PM

I started the day by going west to Hawaii to collect SZA imagery at sunrise from GOES-West and sharing these with the forecasters. How much more ‘usable’ information can SZA provide compared the traditional imagery, and how much sooner if possible?

4 PM

After several discussion regarding DSS, LightningCast, and how to interpret the Synthetic GeoXO Imagery, we were able to get the Lightning Stoplight product into our AWIPS-II! Forecasters stated in the morning discussions they want to immediately union these data with LightningCast, and some procedures were made to help them out at the beginning of ops tomorrow. I created an animation of the Lightning Stoplight that includes GLM, ENTLN flashes, and ABI Clean-IR imagery. I set the opacity of the Lightning Stoplight to 80% so the colors stand out, but you can still see some detail underneath. We’ll see how well the forecasters like this information and if they make any new displays. This animation shows the dissipation of a thunderstorm on the western side of the scene, and you can see the loss of GLM FED data, while the Lightning Stoplight product changes colors and shrinks in size to indicate a decreasing lightning hazard.


The day ended with a quick look at sea-breeze thunderstorms in eastern Cuba for the SZA imagery. Its interesting to see the low clouds and how long they stay present in the SZA’s modified DCPD RGB. We’ll see how the forecasters like this in the morning.

 

Kevin

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Tuesdays HWT

Posted in DSS, Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026, SZA Imagery on by Kevin Thiel.

Main issue today was to do IDSS near Delhi MS. We were using lightning cast and lightning stoplight. We were also issued a few warnings. Fortunately, we had a storm move over the region so we were quite busy for at least an hour or so.

Our team created some loops of the data. A long loop of GLM and ltg prob is below …

 

 

 

The blinking circle was our DSS site. Lena was our “emergency manager” for the day.

We had thorough conversations with Lena and Kevin regarding using the tow lightning products in operations. We agreed that the products are very useful, but would not work all that well to send these products directly to our partners.

Note that we had a thorough conversation on the slack channel and you can follow the “blow by blow” discussions there.

We also had a great conversation with Lena regarding how we interact with our emergency managers.

Regarding Lightncast, I believe that the planview products are good. I prefer looking at the imagery like this though >>>>

 

Note that the data probabilities on the awips image above go from 0% to 100 percent.  Why is it important to show the data this way instead of contours? The reason is you can see the VERY beginning of when the ltg probs start to show up. Using contours, you have to wait until the 10% prob shows up. Note that I do not have sat pix imagery overlaid, The reason why I do this with AWIPS is I can have the sat pix data opened up in another panel and use the cursor to read the data. Also the contours (or the image for that matter) would get “lost” (or buried) within the colors of the sat pix imagery.

We used the Lightning Stoplight product today. This was helpful in letting us know when the last flash occurred in the 10, 20 and 30 increment time frame. However I am hesitant with sharing this directly with the EMs.

I envision that the Stoplight product and the LightningCast product will be married in the future, and this will make these two products more useful.

I can not say enough how valuable the lightningcast product is. Prior to this we did not have a good idea when lightning would be a threat, and would have to carefully watch radar data and do cross sections or monitor to -10C level. With lightningcast, you have the probabilities calculated for you in real time every minute (mesosector) or every 5 minutes for CONUS.(However waiting 5 minutes is wayyyyyyyy toooooo lonnnnnnnnnnnnng.

We talked about the SZA product. This is a no brainer and this satellite product should be implemented operationally as soon as possible. Being able to see the detail in the sat pix data towards sunset is priceless.

-Mesovortex

Tags: None

Overview: Week 1, Day 2

Posted in Daily Summaries, SPG2026, SZA Imagery on by Kevin Thiel.

10AM

Day 2 of the experiment brought another Moderate Risk region from the SPC, driven by a 30% CIG 2 Hail outlook. Thunderstorms were expected to form along an advancing dry line, with a diffuse temperature and moisture gradient in place from southern Oklahoma to northern Alabama as of 15Z. After our morning debrief, the Fort Worth-Dallas office (FWD) was a pretty easy pick for us to target today. After more discussion, we decided our second WFO should be further east ahead of some early morning convection in the Jackson, MS (JAN) office. Unfortunately the Lightning Stoplight product continued to face ingest issues and was unavailable today, and we hope to have it in AWIPS tomorrow. In the meantime forecasters viewed that data on the SPoRT Lightning Viewer and in GR2Analyst.

1 PM

Forecasters today were tasked with issuing simulated Severe Thunderstorm and Tornado warnings in WarnGen on AWIPS-II, along with providing decision support for mock-events that we created for each office. Today FWD was tasked with mock-DSS for a Red River BBQ Cookoff near Gainesville, TX, and JAN was tasked with mock-DSS for a hazmat spill near Waverly, MS. Shortly after operations began, CI occurred just west of the FWD CWA, and thunderstorms were maturing just west of the JAN CWA. This gave everyone plenty of storms to observe, and the forecasters with the chance to issue warnings and communicate hazards through decision support.

I spent part of the day in ops viewing the SZA imagery product on the west coast shortly after sunrise. When comparing SZA data in a modified Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB against the traditional RGB, the differences are stark right at sunrise, and features stand out sooner. How much sooner is something we need to determine. There was a nice discussion in the morning about how SZA imagery may benefit WFOs in higher latitudes (main example: Alaska). I also compared the modified SZA RGB against CIRA’s GeoColor imagery, and found that more interesting than anything.

 

When zooming into the SZA imagery in north Texas, it appears the 0.69µm (channel 2) imagery has ‘gaps’ in highly reflective features. My first hypothesis is that the solar zenith adjustment is pushing reflectance factor values above 130% and creating plotting issues in AWIPS, but I feel like traditional ABI visible imagery saw similar artifacts in AWIPS after launch that had to be corrected.

Kevin

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Overview: Week 1, Day 1

Posted in Daily Summaries, Lightning Stoplight, LightningCast, SPG2026, Synthetic GXI, SZA Imagery on by Kevin Thiel.

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 localized to Paducah, KY (PAH) and St. Louis, MO (LSX) with the expectation that semi-discrete thunderstorms would develop during our operations period. Unfortunately thunderstorms took too long to develop for PAH, but there was plenty of thunderstorms to the west across Missouri and north towards Illinois and Indiana.

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.

4PM

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

To end the day, I saved off some animations of the SZA products. I tried adjust the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB recipe when including the Channel 2 and 5 SZA bands, so we will see how forecasters react to that product.
Kevin
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