Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:24:15
Unknown
And I’m going to talk a little bit about what the system that’s at present responsible for income snow over the silver Colorado and some developing severe weather over the high plains of Texas has done in the past. This has been a fairly energetic system. So the screen right now is just looking at the visible imagery showing the dust going through Southern Nevada.

00:00:24:18 – 00:00:52:19
Unknown
Dropping dew points far below zero. So those are visible imagery. Some of this coming along with Goes-r will be the 12 micron. It’s coming back. I guess I should say, if you’ve been around for a long time, you know, that goes 11 also had a 12 micron Neptune 11 -12 difference field between. Well, if you do a difference field between 11 and 12 microns, that’s an excellent, brightness temperature difference to show you where the dust, where dust in the atmosphere is.

00:00:52:19 – 00:01:21:00
Unknown
It has other applications as well, but it does do a great job for dust. And that’s just showing. These are just the modest imagery from this past Tuesday showing the, dust moving, southward through, through Nevada. Something that and something that made me think, well, this system, when it comes out under the plains, is going to have some kind of punch with it because it was energetic enough to cause this dust storm to form.

00:01:21:02 – 00:01:53:15
Unknown
There are other products you can use to look at, stratospheric extrusions. So this is looking at ozone from the go sounder. And this is a current image and it’s showing a region of enhanced ozone over Utah and Nevada Arizona. So up over 350 Dobson units and indicative of the strength of the stratospheric extrusion going down the troposphere with this particular system.

00:01:53:17 – 00:02:14:19
Unknown
I also want to show you the, the water vapor imagery just to kind of set the table of what’s going on today. So a nice cut off flow over the, it’s near the four corners. Let me move this around a little bit. And very strong jet indicated here coming in from the from our Mexico.

00:02:14:22 – 00:02:39:02
Unknown
So very strong southwest winds aloft. It’s going to help with the shear profile of these developing thunderstorms. You can just see them starting to develop. Over, over near Amarillo. And there’s a, tornado watch box, that’s been issued, I think, about 40 minutes ago for portions of the eastern Texas Panhandle. You can see through the water vapor here.

00:02:39:04 – 00:03:05:07
Unknown
Imagery. So, terrain features are visible. So again, showing kind of the strength of the dry air as well. So you’d expect to see that with the stratospheric extrusion. I want to show you some sounder data that you can also get in. So should also get an ellipse. This is a lifted index, from 18 V, so hour and a half ago.

00:03:05:07 – 00:03:32:23
Unknown
And it does show strong destabilization. If you’ve been watching this through the course of the day. There’s been some very nice destabilization here. As the sun has come up in, there’s some fairly cold air aloft rotating around as well. But we see the axis of the instability. If you live in the eastern part of the Texas Panhandle here and that’s this is this correlates pretty nicely with where the where the watch box is.

00:03:32:25 – 00:04:06:25
Unknown
It’s it’s in this region. I’m kind of, moving around so it goes under lifted index, values down to around -8 to -10 over the Texas Panhandle. Do the same thing with the, composite cape. This sounder cape values pushing 4000. So a lot of instability available for any kind of developing system that, for any kind of developing thunderstorm that forms over the Texas High Plains.

00:04:06:26 – 00:04:29:12
Unknown
And finally, I just want to show the, precipitable water. This is also a field you can get in a website. I can’t run what’s on my laptop, or I’d be showing you showing it to you from that. But, this is an interesting to watch because the, precipitable water over the last couple of days has kind of been backing up into, backing up into the high plains of Colorado.

00:04:29:13 – 00:04:49:16
Unknown
So on Monday, the of the values over Colorado were generally, less than ten millimeters, and now they’re closer to 28. Now they’re closer to 20 to 25. So that’s just kind of showing you what the.

00:04:49:18 – 00:05:15:15
Unknown
What the overall, large scale features are that are, that are associated with this developing system. And, if you have any questions, I can answer them. But otherwise I think I’ll, toss this back to Dan. And he’s eager to talk about things that are going on in this neck of the woods. Okay. Thanks, Scott. And as I do this, maybe you can send a reminder email to Ed because I don’t see him on yet.

00:05:15:16 – 00:05:36:13
Unknown
Okay. What I am going to bring up is in my browser here. Scott just mentioned that tornado watch box, and here it is down in the Texas Panhandle, including the Oklahoma Panhandle. And, it’s a good idea to to get an idea of the instability, like Scott just showed to give you a, a general idea of it.

00:05:36:13 – 00:06:02:24
Unknown
And and you can use something like the SPC analysis to get, another general idea of where that instability axis is. But another really good tool is to just do a metal analysis with the, satellite imagery, along with surface observations. Something like something like, what I’ll show here. I’ll just quickly show a loop first and then I’ll stop it at an individual time.

00:06:02:27 – 00:06:32:12
Unknown
And, currently you can see storms developing in the warm center, down in the Texas Panhandle. But really, how did we get there? And where precisely is the warm sector as one of the things that you can, utilize the satellite imagery along with the surface observations to, to highlight that earlier, a cold front, made its way, southward into the, west west central Texas panhandle over here in eastern New Mexico.

00:06:32:12 – 00:07:02:20
Unknown
And since then, the winds have turned around to more easterly. Earlier, some storms were going along that boundary. But, what I want to do next here is just stop it at a particular time and I’ll use, a little bit larger image just to annotate on here. So if we stop it here at 1745, what I’m going to do is just point out right around, this time here, we had a cold front that extended down something like this.

00:07:02:22 – 00:07:25:03
Unknown
And then, at the eastern edge of that, you can see these, low stratus cloud. You can see, stable wave clouds indicating a stable air mass. So it looks like we had some convection trying to go that most likely elevated convection going in that area also, northeast of that up here and, the Oklahoma Panhandle.

00:07:25:06 – 00:07:44:06
Unknown
Meanwhile, over here in the kind of the between that we have these unstable cloud streets and that’s our, most unstable air mass. That’s our warm sector to work with. And you can see I’ll go ahead and define it, something like that. There’s the southern end of it, and it gets more narrow as you go to the north here.

00:07:44:09 – 00:08:09:12
Unknown
So we have a relatively wider, warm sector as we go further to the south here. So any of these, southern storms will have a longer residence time in the warm sector compared to the storms, further to the north, which will have this relatively narrow area to work with and then eventually move over to the more stable airmass as they move towards the northeast.

00:08:09:12 – 00:08:37:05
Unknown
So this is a good exercise to go through in terms of, not only pre-storm, but as the storms are unfolding here, you can you can get a quick idea in terms of, where that instability axis is and how it’s evolving. Storms are going up. And another thing you have to watch for us as storms are developing or outflow boundaries is, is, storms are, developing here.

00:08:37:07 – 00:09:08:08
Unknown
So any questions about that before I move on to the next, set of imagery? Okay. I am going to clear my drawing here first, and then I’m going to talk about the synthetic imagery from the, NSL wharf. This is initialized at zero z. And the synthetic imagery, remember, is just model output, made to display like it’s satellite imagery.

00:09:08:11 – 00:09:31:09
Unknown
So these bands are simulated. And in this particular case we’re simulating the 10.35 micron band, which is our all our imagery here. This is at 12 Z this morning. And so this would be the 12 hour forecast. And what I want to do is just, there’s 12 of you right here. Just move out forward in the forecast time period.

00:09:31:11 – 00:10:04:08
Unknown
And as we move forward in the time period as well, watch a couple areas here over Colorado and then also the Texas Panhandle over the Texas Panhandle, you can see the thunderstorms forecast to develop during the afternoon hours. There’s 2021 Z right here. And obviously just based on the mezzo analysis we just did in the area and extreme western Oklahoma and, extreme northeast Texas Panhandle, remember, will be a little bit more stable and it looks like it’s missing out.

00:10:04:10 – 00:10:33:24
Unknown
And some of those low level clouds that we were looking at, as we go a little bit further on here, you can see a line of convection extending all the way up in the Colorado. And that’s forecast to kind of, move off to the northeast. And then as we get into the evening hours, watch what’s happening over central Colorado here as we see, additional convection developing and then moving towards the Front range here with, quite a bit of precip.

00:10:33:24 – 00:11:07:18
Unknown
The models were showing a lot of precip, coming in this evening. And it’s, very interesting rain, snow. Question mark, because, we’ve been getting snow here in, Fort Collins and, and Boulder and, have a little bit on the ground here. So it’s if this falls is snow tonight, it would be quite substantial. So with that in mind, to talk more about the potential for snow and the precip across the area, I’m going to turn it over to Ed Oak.

00:11:07:21 – 00:11:31:06
Unknown
Oh. Hey. I made it. Sorry. I was actually at a retirement seminar. Oh, okay. Are you ready to speak? All I have up right now is the. I has a few fields from the her I guess I could talk to. Is that. Yeah. That’s fine. Maybe. Maybe we’ll just. I didn’t look to see what your photos are under any.

00:11:31:06 – 00:11:54:27
Unknown
We have, North Platte, and we also have, southern region headquarters. I assume they’re down in Fort Worth. Okay. So it’s, well, this over here, and everybody see my screen. Now I can see it. Okay, well, this is our current our current setup. We’re so close to the edge that it’s actually raining. So we had a burst of snow.

00:11:54:27 – 00:12:21:12
Unknown
As Dan said, when we had this heavier than, which is now way up into Cheyenne, earlier, earlier today. And we ended up anywhere from about 3 to 4in of snow. But it’s actually the amount of snow is decreased on the ground. And we have some very late rain. It’s kind of mixed with snow, but I just drove down from a slightly higher elevation and it was all snow, maybe about 150ft higher than where we are now.

00:12:21:15 – 00:12:42:17
Unknown
So this is the kind of deal where if it were to come down heavier, the dynamics increased, the lift was stronger as well. I think we would also perhaps and do some cooling. So, so we probably go back to snow, at the same time, we’re battling warm advection, which is helping to produce, of course, the precipitation which could change, affect rain.

00:12:42:17 – 00:13:02:24
Unknown
So if we go next to the, I just wanted to maybe point out a few fields in the here that unfortunately, you could also, if you were unable to see it or up the web. But if you’re on a unaware, you might be able to, look at soundings, which I was not able to do, but you could look at soundings from the her.

00:13:02:26 – 00:13:24:22
Unknown
So this is the, last one that we have, which is actually 17 V, which seems slightly slow. We should get a new run in with now that the her is being distributed out of inset about an hour and a half after initialization. So by now, we really should have. The 18 is probably right on the verge of coming in, but this will start it this one hour in and you can see has to be.

00:13:24:22 – 00:13:43:21
Unknown
And Dan stands up here. And that was the band they were in. I assume it’s slowed down though Dan or. Yeah, not as much as earlier. Right. And, there should be more bands. You know, we have this upper level low. Did you talk about the overall setup, Dan? I guess big upper level low. Yeah. Scott did earlier.

00:13:43:24 – 00:14:06:29
Unknown
Good. And so, you know that that’s forcing, mean we have low level northerly winds and, forcing the southeasterly, southeasterly flow right over that, developing new new bands as well. And you can see one coming here later in the later in the afternoon. There’s a little one now forming. But as we go later in the afternoon and so things are going to pick up.

00:14:07:01 – 00:14:28:09
Unknown
And then the even more major development, as we can see in through here that comes in overnight, of course goes out to 15 hours. And there you see some stairs. I’m looking at composite reflectivity, which by the way, we kind of we kind of recommend the one kilometer tends to be a little skimpy on the here. We really if you if you look at reflectivity probably good to look at composite reflectivity.

00:14:28:09 – 00:14:48:22
Unknown
And you could compare that directly on to a composite reflectivity. And you can see there’s some pretty hefty amount. So as Dan said, if it were to be snow and it will be in the foothills for sure, it’s going to be some very, very heavy amounts. These are model predicted reflectivity, in the 40s. Question is is it going to be snow?

00:14:48:22 – 00:15:12:22
Unknown
So there’s something in there in the her called the precip type field. And that directly uses the hydro meteors that the physics package produces. So we started off at ATC and you see that the where the lines are horizontal, I mean, we could all see this field. Now that means it’s it’s still also the colors in here are actually the amount of precip in every hour.

00:15:12:25 – 00:15:28:21
Unknown
And then this hatched region is kind of a mixed bag. You all see freezing rain hopefully here because we hardly ever get freezing rain. That would be a diagonal. But you might do that out in North Platte. That’s it. They’re going go going the other way. And and plain old rain is out here. So you can see watch what happens.

00:15:28:24 – 00:15:55:15
Unknown
In this forecast we start to get mixed. This occurs actually I’ve been following this from last night. I did a very good job this morning with this precip type. And it does show unfortunately, as I prefer snow. But this is by 3:00 it is all rain. This is little areas of mixed snow on the higher elevations as we go south of us here on the Palmer device of any kind of it has a majority of rain.

00:15:55:17 – 00:16:14:25
Unknown
One thing, that you see that as the evening goes on, we got into that stronger, band. You could see it. It’s still says rain right up. I mean, right at the base of the foothills. I probably would have an elevation of change over at about 6000ft. Can’t get much closer than that. We’re for 50 500ft here.

00:16:14:25 – 00:16:35:03
Unknown
Roughly. The other thing that’s interesting is you see this snow mixed mix of actually working its way north from the higher elevation of Palmer today, later in the forecast. And I think that reflects perhaps some of the colder air, coming with the upper level low itself as it moves north. So that’s kind of a wild card.

00:16:35:03 – 00:16:55:02
Unknown
Of course, if it is going to cut off the piece of as the upper low gets, gets too close. But and then of course, one thing that’s kind of critical around here, a lot of the Front Range is the 700 millibar flow. And what we have also is temperatures. And we’d like to look for about a minus four.

00:16:55:05 – 00:17:18:18
Unknown
And this these are in increments. That’s just 0 to 2.5 below par 5 to -5. So if we follow this line here this was earlier well to the east. But you can see it kind of pushes westward. So we’re obviously fighting up the warm advection from the storm which is helping to produce the heavy precip. And it kind of state the sliding state a little.

00:17:18:18 – 00:17:41:29
Unknown
So we’re right on the edge, but it looks like it’s just got a little Dan. It’s plenty of honking upslope, but unfortunately it, appears to get a little too warm. Hopefully, this will be a little cooler than it is, but, so the I guess the one thing I would would say to emphasize is that this precip type is an interesting field to, to try to use.

00:17:41:29 – 00:18:02:01
Unknown
I seem to do a pretty good job, and it might be something worth looking at of other folks. Dan, what do you think? I don’t necessarily have anything else. Would you want to show some that you go over synthetic imagery today? The other models are doing or. Yeah, and Fort Worth has something to show. Oh, that’d be great.

00:18:02:01 – 00:18:12:21
Unknown
Before we turn it over to, I just first want to ask, is there any questions on, what Ed just presented here?

00:18:12:24 – 00:18:34:10
Unknown
I guess I just ask, how did the herd do on the precept type today? It has been doing very, very well. Okay. Scott, I looked at it last night, and, it made a nice forecast of having snow this morning. Where are some of the larger models? I think we’re blurring the, you know, maybe they don’t have quite the resolution near the Front Range, but they suggestion was it would be more rain.

00:18:34:10 – 00:18:57:27
Unknown
And I think that was what was generally going with the forecast. So it has been doing a good job. One of the things that’s happened, the latest out of the precip has gotten lighter. It’s tended to go more rain, but it’d be interesting to see if we get into these heavier bands later, if we can maybe go back to to snow, where we can’t get much closer to the snow level than we are right now, probably within about 100ft of the surface, I would say.

00:18:57:27 – 00:19:22:04
Unknown
But but yeah, it it tends to it’s it’s a little more complex. That and perhaps some other precip type of algorithms. I think that’s it there. Okay. Let me ask for with, you said, you have something to show there. That southern region would be, would are you ready for me to, pass you control?

00:19:22:06 – 00:19:27:27
Unknown
Sure. Yeah. Okay. Great.

00:19:27:29 – 00:19:35:08
Unknown
Yeah. So this is Jack. Sent them out here. I just happened to be joining today for the first time, and.

00:19:35:11 – 00:20:03:12
Unknown
What? I thought, well, you know, the weather’s getting here, and you can see this. What’s interesting, and this is Cass, interface. This is the one radar on a rooftop there. And a building at University of Texas at Arlington. So you can see this one radar in its domain on the circle here. And you can see these really fine scale features of reflectivity, you know, coming in on the south southwest flow.

00:20:03:15 – 00:20:27:21
Unknown
Unfortunately, you can’t, you know, and I said this back to the creators is speed up the frame. But again, you can see these little pieces moving through. So that’s one option. That’s a single radar. And then the the network is this view which right now one of them is turned off for maintenance. So there would be for I believe they’re supposed to be six if not eight somewhere down the road.

00:20:27:24 – 00:20:49:27
Unknown
But that’s this view. And you can of course load a loop across there as well. What are the size of those circles? Are those 40km, 40km or or say Fort Worth of Dallas, some in America. Look, it’s, 30 miles. What was the bill? So. Okay, if you could do the math quick enough that, maybe 50W is in?

00:20:49:28 – 00:21:10:22
Unknown
What? I don’t know. Is it that the circle up here for the Addison line is bigger than the other? So I’m not sure if these are just. I know this whole network kind of shows self adjust, but I’m not quite sure why that circle is bigger than the others. Are they all the same wavelength? Mostly it’s supposed to be Eric Allison’s here with me, so?

00:21:10:24 – 00:21:30:09
Unknown
So that’s what the roof looks like. They’re they’re just for, you know, a scale reference that you can swap in their interface to the idea. So if you take a look at that last image such as that and you swap over to the eight days, you can see that. And so it’s kind of amazing. You know, it’s not surprising.

00:21:30:09 – 00:21:56:17
Unknown
But that’s the way. So obviously this stuff’s not in our domain yet. And those cells that we saw in our domain are, you know, buried within the clutter of the ADHD, which is, you know, south of Fort Worth. How how new is this network? Well, it’s interesting. Yeah. It’s what within the last year. It’s actually, turning on the first radar.

00:21:56:20 – 00:22:31:18
Unknown
Yes. We’ve been gathering players and putting them up and mounting them. And like I said, there’s two more in the works that are supposed to be turned on. What’s the temporal resolution? It’s basically as it has. We play one here and I can see the times. Right. Yeah. So a dish, that’s not it. Tried again.

00:22:31:20 – 00:22:59:04
Unknown
Right now it’s a minute. Looks like. And that’s the mosaic. Yeah, I think it’s I think a minute. Oh, that’s, very interesting because, when Goes-r comes along next year, we’ll frequently have, one minute imagery available and mesoscale sectors for, severe weather example events, for example. So, so we’ll have a really good time match with, goes-r imagery for, for next year.

00:22:59:04 – 00:23:15:03
Unknown
So it’d be nice to compare these, you know, an events where you, where you have these, nice castle radar domains. Yeah. That would be maybe a good reason to get a stick or something like that or. Right, so that we could fit it in there. And that’s one of the things I look at is the raw data.

00:23:15:04 – 00:23:32:22
Unknown
I don’t know where it’s here. It’s flowing through here. It’s going to the WFO up the street. But obviously if if others could get their hands on it, they could put it into a interface where you could look at multiple things going into a website. This is it. It is flowing through somebody’s headquarters, into the local office, as whips to parallel.

00:23:32:25 – 00:23:58:06
Unknown
We’ve gone that far. Speaking of one minute data, starting in mid-May for about a month, we’re going to be having routine one minute data, and we’ll be sending it to, to the LDM for for any officers who want to pull it in an ellipse to just let us know. Okay. It’s a nice compliment to because eastern goes west, especially since it’s centered over roughly the longitude of central Texas.

00:23:58:08 – 00:24:20:21
Unknown
So great. And that’s only a few. Is that correct? It’s that we have it in a UPS one, Andy. UPS to so and it works for actually. So just let us know. Send Dan back us an email later and we can, give you a set of instructions for that. Okay. That might be something we’d be interested in.

00:24:20:23 – 00:24:40:17
Unknown
Is this North Platte? Yes. Are you are you guys still on ellipse one? Yes we are. Yeah. Well, about an hour to go to solve a problem, but it may be that we can go through, like Chad Gravel or somebody like that. Yeah. Chad, probably has the instructions. If if he doesn’t, I’ll send them to him and we will be sending out both formats the next.

00:24:40:17 – 00:24:47:16
Unknown
Yeah. For ellipse one as well as he those to okay.

00:24:47:19 – 00:25:19:04
Unknown
Okay. Anything else, Fort Worth or I’ll bring it back to my screen. Here. I’ll go. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very interesting. I guess the only other thing I forgot to mention is the synthetic imagery that, that I was showing earlier is available in a website as well. So if you’re interested in seeing that this is from the, four kilometer missile wharf, and then, the four kilometer Nam nest is available, and it looks like this here.

00:25:19:04 – 00:25:39:16
Unknown
So if you’re interested in either of those and in area website, please let us know. Okay. Any other questions, comments or discussion? I have a question about the Castle radar. Is that available online or is it just through a website? This interface is a web interface, and I guess we can get you a username password. Maybe.

00:25:39:16 – 00:26:04:22
Unknown
You know, it’s not really supposedly huge, but I don’t think that would be a an issue. So it’s not generally available to the public. No okay. Not not at all. Let’s use username and password okay. Yeah. For goes. Well I mean for the SRA. So our testing for Goes 14 in May. That would be awesome to have that kind of comparison.

00:26:04:24 – 00:26:14:01
Unknown
Some to get to be able to get a username and password would be great.

00:26:14:03 – 00:26:29:29
Unknown
Okay. Well we can conclude here. And just want to thank everybody for joining. And if you ever have, any question at any point, just let us know. And we’re always, welcome in terms of, answering questions that you have. Thanks. And have a great day. Thanks.