GOES Sounder Near-casting Demonstrated at the Hazardous Weather Testbed

Robert Aune and Ralph Petersen of CIMSS participated in the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Oklahoma. They assisted participants with interpreting products generated by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Sounder near-casting model running at CIMSS.

Nearcasting model products.

Information from the GOES-13 sounder water vapor channels help to define the regions most susceptible to convection on that day. This technique initializes a trajectory model with Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) winds and precipitable water at different levels as retrieved from the GOES-13 sounder.

The near-casting model was used to estimate locations in the U.S. where severe convective storms were most likely to form and were not likely to form, up to nine hours in advance. Forecasters at the severe convective storms desk, the heavy precipitation desk, and the convective initiation desk found the products to be very useful throughout the exercise, citing numerous cases where the near-casting products added value to the forecast process.

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