Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:01:27 – 00:00:19:10
Speaker 1
Yeah, we we lost Michael for some reason.

00:00:19:22 – 00:00:43:04
Speaker 1
I’m going to get started with an introduction. My name is Brian Mata. And, what you should be seeing on your go to meeting is the login screen for the Earth Network streamer RC. This is a web based, access to the Earth network’s, lightning data that, that, all the operational us is, should have access to.

00:00:43:04 – 00:01:05:18
Speaker 1
You should have a logging and password for your office, where the service has been evaluating us for the last year and a half, and it’s basically on the verge of, being implemented. And if you were to, should be available, this fall. And, the aim is to build that. It will be, coming out.

00:01:05:18 – 00:01:45:29
Speaker 1
So, without further ado, just want to show you a real time example. This is off the, Jacksonville Beach. Coastline here in Florida. And what we can see is the radar imagery behind and, the, animating, total lightning data and then our lightning, cell track here and this little warm, wormy looking thing with the, with the tool tip here with the latest position of the the cell analyze, lightning cluster, analysis.

00:01:45:29 – 00:02:25:07
Speaker 1
And then, what that what you get for that polygon area in here is, an analysis of the cell area, the centroid, the total flash rate in cloud flash rate, the cloud of ground flash rate, etc.. Including direction on speed of motion of, the storm cell as analyzed by lightning. And then if I pop up this graphic behind here, it also gives you a timetable and, a nice graph of the, the Fiji, the cloud and the total, lightning.

00:02:25:09 – 00:02:59:11
Speaker 1
So, so this tool is out there and, as we prepare for, goes-r and total lightning from the lightning mapper, we’ve been evaluating some of the, ground based networks, both the lightning mapping arrays and, the CERT network’s data, which is available, nationally. And I can show you, what that domain looks like.

00:02:59:13 – 00:03:27:05
Speaker 1
And I actually covers quite a bit of real estate. There are some data globally, and, over the oceanic areas around the colonies even. I’ve been to, Canada. So quite a bit of data out there. And, what the rest of what we’re gonna talk about, in the next few minutes is going to be, a discussion led by Al Cope.

00:03:27:05 – 00:03:55:10
Speaker 1
And al looked at the, total lightning trends for a recent, traumatic event in the Boston area and, the city of Revere. And, I guess I will pass Castrol, back to you, Dan. And you can bounce that to, al. And so, al all the sailing on Mount Holly and, take it away. Yeah.

00:03:55:13 – 00:04:00:13
Unknown
Okay. Oh, wait to see,

00:04:00:23 – 00:04:03:21
Speaker 3
Yeah. Show my screen. Okay.

00:04:05:08 – 00:04:08:11
Unknown
Okay. Can you. I have a,

00:04:08:13 – 00:04:22:09
Speaker 3
IRC network stream our our team map up for the Boston area, if you can. If everybody can see that. Yep. We got it. And I’ll point out here to stay here in Reno a little slow.

00:04:22:12 – 00:04:26:26
Speaker 1
So the map doesn’t. It just popped up like, two seconds ago.

00:04:26:29 – 00:04:46:04
Speaker 3
Okay. Yeah, hopefully. I, I know our internet connection isn’t the best here anyway, where you can see the the, town of Revere, just northeast of, Boston, for reference. That’s where that’s where the tornado occurred.

00:04:47:07 – 00:04:53:28
Unknown
And I will say that our office here, we’ve had the if, Earth Network star.

00:04:53:28 – 00:05:28:24
Speaker 3
Lightning for a couple of years and, we, we do actually use it, operationally. Mostly just forecaster. Just bring up the display and it shows the lightning, loop of total lightning. Probably look probably less use in real time of those, the cell tracks and, you know, drilling down and, calling up the, the line graphs of the lightning rate, but, those those are useful to I’ve, I’ve actually used it more in kind of a kind of a retrospective mode.

00:05:30:22 – 00:05:51:21
Speaker 3
Let’s see on the, in the upper right hand corner of the map, there’s, an archive button, and if you click that, you get a lightning archive. And, but in order to get that, you have to be at zoom level nine or higher. And you can see that.

00:05:51:24 – 00:05:56:23
Unknown
That covers a relatively small area,

00:05:56:25 – 00:06:20:04
Speaker 3
Probably in a lot of cases, not even a full seaway, depending on the size of your CWA. But, but anyway, it if you click on the lightning archive, then you can specify a start and end date and time. And what you get is a rectangular area defined by the lat law and coordinates.

00:06:20:06 – 00:06:26:12
Unknown
And you are limited to, no more than six hours at a time. So it’s a limited amount you can get.

00:06:26:12 – 00:07:00:03
Speaker 3
But, if you’re really interested in doing a more larger scale kind of study, you can probably get additional data from Earth networks. I think they’re eager to, share it at this point. And the data you can get at two different formats, either a, a KMC file for viewing at Google Earth, or you could get a, comma separated variable file for just, for you can import it to a spreadsheet and, and proceed from there.

00:07:00:05 – 00:07:23:28
Speaker 3
So, so that’s what I did for this case. I, there was some talk about the tornado and I said, hey, well, I think I’ll just take a look at the what the Earth Network’s total lightning had for that case. So I downloaded, about a two hour period. And so here’s the, here’s the KMC file displayed.

00:07:25:10 – 00:07:27:08
Speaker 3
That’s just a screen capture, but it’s.

00:07:27:12 – 00:07:34:17
Unknown
Go on, Google Earth and, this is for the period 12 to 14.

00:07:34:18 – 00:08:16:29
Speaker 3
The on July 28th. And you can see, a northwest, the, southwest to northeast track across the, the Boston area. Yeah. And you can see there’s, The concentration of lightning of of the cell increasing southwest of Boston. And then as it moved northeast, as it gets close to the city and the lightning activity dies down, and then it picks up again in the northeastern part and continues on up across the river and left and, across that area.

00:08:17:23 – 00:08:31:09
Speaker 3
And actually, if you look looking at this at Google Earth, actually, you can use the time slider bar to see the evolution of the of the lightning over time. So and that’s pretty neat to look at.

00:08:31:12 – 00:08:37:24
Unknown
But, plotting that data as a function of time, you get.

00:08:37:26 – 00:08:44:28
Speaker 3
A graph like this. So it’s sort of like the, the real time graph, except, this.

00:08:44:28 – 00:08:51:18
Unknown
Is from, Excel. And so and this is.

00:08:51:27 – 00:09:19:27
Speaker 3
You know, I just, and the lightning by every one minute and then plotted it, from 12 to 14 Z. So you can see the increase here starting, from and the time from 1230 to 1240, there’s a rapid increase in total lightning. Then it falls off, by 1300. It’s kind of a lull there until 1320, and then it picks up again, although not as strongly as before.

00:09:20:29 – 00:09:42:18
Speaker 3
So there’s a couple of, periods here of rapid increase in total lightning. And I should say the, the blue line is the cloud. The ground flashes from, Earth networks. The purple line is the cloud to ground from, by solar National or NLD,

00:09:42:20 – 00:09:47:26
Unknown
And which I, which I just counted up using a web so you can see the.

00:09:47:29 – 00:10:11:25
Speaker 3
The cloud, the ground rate. It’s pretty consistent from the two different sources, which, gives me a little more confidence in the, the, accuracy of the Earth networks. But you can see that the red is the infra cloud, flashes, and then the green is the total of the some of the of the,

00:10:11:28 – 00:10:17:14
Unknown
The blue in the red, so you can see there’s, there’s a little bit of increase in the.

00:10:17:14 – 00:10:37:23
Speaker 3
Cloud to ground, but there’s a much stronger increase in the infra cloud and total lightning. Yeah. That’s why it’s been noted, you know, over the past decade or more that people have looked at total lightning and said, you know, people have tried to look at the cloud to ground lightning, to see some relationship between lightning and severe, you know, and sometimes it’s there and some notes not.

00:10:37:25 – 00:10:55:04
Speaker 3
But there seems to be a better, better relationship. If you look at the total lightning, at many times, not always, but often enough, you’ll see a rapid increase as a, as a, as a storm is increasing in the updrafts or strike thing. And it’s.

00:10:56:03 – 00:11:03:22
Unknown
Becoming severe or close to severe. Okay. So.

00:11:03:24 – 00:11:06:13
Speaker 3
Then I have another graph.

00:11:06:16 – 00:11:10:01
Unknown
That I made, and, this covers the.

00:11:10:01 – 00:11:12:09
Speaker 3
Same time period.

00:11:13:02 – 00:11:19:08
Unknown
But. In this case, I’m trying to I’m applying an algorithm.

00:11:19:20 – 00:11:45:28
Speaker 3
Which is designed to sort of automatically identify, a face these rapid increases or or known as lightning jumps. I mean, you can sort of see it qualitatively, subjectively, by your eye. You can see where it is, especially when you’re looking at retrospective mode and you can see the whole storm, you know, but if you were at, at the time at 1235 and you could only see up to here, it might not be quite as clear.

00:11:45:28 – 00:11:52:00
Unknown
But there is a way to automate that. There’s a number of algorithms. So the one that’s,

00:11:52:02 – 00:12:07:12
Speaker 3
Been studied most I think, is called a two sigma algorithm. And the reason they call it that is because it uses the standard deviation or variability of lightning over the past ten minutes as kind of a background.

00:12:07:15 – 00:12:10:14
Speaker 1
Level of variability that looks at the current.

00:12:10:14 – 00:12:12:00
Speaker 3
Rate of increase.

00:12:12:14 – 00:12:15:18
Unknown
Based on the end of two minutes.

00:12:15:20 – 00:12:41:25
Speaker 3
If lightning during the current two minutes is increasing a lot more than the previous two minutes, and the rate of increase is greater than the standard deviation over the past ten minutes, such as occurring at 1231 here, where the blue line goes above the red line. That would have been considered a lightning job. And, you might have some kind of alert, pop up on your screen saying lightning rapid increase in lightning.

00:12:42:02 – 00:12:59:21
Speaker 3
Consider a severe thunderstorm warning or something like that. And you would use that in combination with radar and other data. But you could see the green at the two minute smooth lightning rate. So it’s a little bit less noisy that in that in the previous graph.

00:12:59:23 – 00:13:09:01
Unknown
But there’s a, there’s a rapid increase between 1230 and 1240. And then, I know the Boston.

00:13:09:01 – 00:13:10:18
Speaker 3
Office issued a warning.

00:13:10:18 – 00:13:16:27
Unknown
At about 1250, based on radar and then some, some.

00:13:16:27 – 00:13:28:27
Speaker 3
Severe reports, occurred about, 15 to 25 minutes later, although they there’s those reports that they did not receive those reports in real time. They didn’t know until later.

00:13:29:00 – 00:13:35:20
Unknown
And then, as the they made the warning 40 minutes long.

00:13:35:20 – 00:14:08:00
Speaker 3
So it expired at 30, 30. And unfortunately, the storm intensified. It produced a tornado at 1332, that 1336, near around the Revere area. So, then they issued a tornado warning after that, but it was that it had already happened. So so in this case, I would say, you know, the the lightning would have supported the severe warning at 1250 and maybe, maybe even, given coverage of the issue a little sooner.

00:14:08:19 – 00:14:14:10
Unknown
And then the second increase might have, supported a severe thunderstorm warning.

00:14:15:04 – 00:14:46:18
Speaker 3
Possibly as early as 1325 or 925, maybe, maybe a little bit later, but possibly giving you 3 or 4 or five minutes of warning before the tornado. But probably, you know, I don’t think it would support a tornado warning, either. Not not to my knowledge that there’s anyone’s found a good way to use lightning data to distinguish between, tornadic and non tornadic severe weather, but at least you could have supported a severe warning in this case.

00:14:46:21 – 00:14:57:16
Speaker 3
As it was, the studio storm appeared to be weakening. And the the forecasters were looking at flash flooding concerns as well. So, and this tornado, you know, lasted four minutes.

00:14:57:18 – 00:15:01:28
Unknown
But EF2 it spun up quickly and.

00:15:02:01 – 00:15:21:10
Speaker 3
Disappeared just as quickly. And that’s typical of many tornadoes in our part of the country that they are difficult to warn for because they’re they develop so rapidly and don’t last very long. So, that’s about it for me for now, I guess, I can entertain any questions or comments.

00:15:21:12 – 00:15:30:03
Speaker 1
Okay. Thanks, al. Yeah, let’s just go around. Bob, we’ll start with the here since here at the top of the, go to list or any.

00:15:30:03 – 00:15:49:07
Speaker 4
Comments on this for you. Yeah, yeah. I’m, I, I don’t really know much about the, lightning density or the flash rates relative to tornado genesis. I thought maybe years back and maybe Alabama, there might have been some work done with this. And they’re talking about, you know, changes in it and, and, you know, maybe some reasoning behind it.

00:15:49:07 – 00:15:52:20
Speaker 4
But yeah, I’m, I’m not overly familiar.

00:15:52:20 – 00:16:20:24
Speaker 1
Either with it. Okay. Yeah. Some of the, some of the work that was done in Huntsville and, and Norman, and other places, they started with what’s called a lightning mapping array. And so they still have those there, and they’re utilizing those in combination with, Earth networks. And, and so when Goes-r gets on stage in combination with Go’s lightning mapper, that it will have up in Geo.

00:16:20:28 – 00:16:50:19
Speaker 1
So, total lightning is coming. And so that’s why we’re, we’re starting to, discuss it. And, you know, see what people think and what people want to know about and that kind of stuff there. There are also some activities going on in a hazardous weather testbed environment. And so you’ll be you’ll be hearing more about, total lightning, as time goes by.

00:16:50:21 – 00:16:50:24
Speaker 1
Yeah.

00:16:50:27 – 00:17:01:29
Speaker 4
Okay. And how about like, rainfall rates or, or are they looking at that association as well? The downpours potential, any of the other severe weather markers that we deal with.

00:17:02:02 – 00:17:37:24
Speaker 1
Yeah, they are there are different, projects looking at that. But, the, the main, the first, is that the association between, the total lightning and severe weather occurrence in general. Co there’ll be more focus, you know, flash flood and other studies. I’m sure. Okay. Thanks, Bob. Brian, we’ll go on. Brian B no.

00:17:37:24 – 00:17:44:05
Speaker 1
Great presentation and, no questions here. Okay, great. And how about Brian.

00:17:44:05 – 00:17:45:07
Speaker 3
C.

00:17:45:19 – 00:17:48:21
Speaker 5
No questions. Very interesting information.

00:17:48:24 – 00:17:56:08
Speaker 1
All right. Thanks. And, Michael, you guys made it back on. Yeah, we made it back. We lost interest in the office for a little bit, but we were back on,

00:17:56:13 – 00:17:57:07
Speaker 5
No questions here.

00:17:57:07 – 00:17:59:06
Speaker 3
It really sounded pretty good. Us.

00:17:59:09 – 00:18:16:24
Speaker 1
All right. Thanks. And, how about Paul? I only question, I guess I have is, we’re kind of time on area here for the data to be flowing in web to his work. We’ll be going to H2 next week. So there’s some, you know, there’s going to come along sooner rather than later. That’d be pretty nice.

00:18:16:27 – 00:18:45:25
Speaker 1
Right. You’re in that group for. Correct. All right. So yeah, you won’t get it in the bill that you’ll get next week, but it’ll be, it’ll be in the point data. But the point data will be in, 1431. And then we’ll have, an initial cut of flash density imagery, and that’ll be in, 40, for one.

00:18:45:27 – 00:19:13:09
Speaker 1
Okay. So by by February, next year, you’ll have it and you’re able to. Okay. Cool. And our plans, like, incorporate this kind of stuff into the scan algorithms so we can get the little trace charts and things like that. Well, yeah, there there are certain tools that, work that are in the works to do, lightning jams and cell tracking and that kind of thing.

00:19:13:26 – 00:19:22:17
Speaker 1
Those are on a separate path, but hopefully, they’ll be, available by the time the data becomes available.

00:19:22:17 – 00:19:29:04
Speaker 5
Well, not quite the last I heard. There’s a Dr. that’s slated for 15.30.

00:19:29:04 – 00:19:30:01
Speaker 1
Okay.

00:19:30:03 – 00:19:53:04
Speaker 5
So it’s going to be a while after that. Unfortunately, if you get to the the plan is to have scanned be able to configure what lightning data source it wants to use. Everything else will be the same. So it’s still fairly simple. But if we can implement that then you can decide, hey, I want to have scan, use the DNA data and if switch and then you can see it in your in your trend graphs.

00:19:53:06 – 00:20:12:01
Speaker 1
Okay, I guess I am aware I guess of a excuse me, a tool that was being touched. I didn’t get, one of the testbeds that it’s kind of a tracking algorithm tool that can be used for any field, basically that’s under that. Are you aware of that, Brian, or. Yeah, that’s the moving trace tool. Yeah. That with us Tom was talking about.

00:20:12:07 – 00:20:14:24
Speaker 1
We talking about, scan in particular.

00:20:14:24 – 00:20:33:28
Speaker 5
So I was talking about scanning a particular. And the moving trace tool is not really expected to be useful in this way because you have to babysit and it’s not automated. Okay. Now, there might be cases where it is useful where those forecaster does have the time to babysit. And this may have been one of the cases, but, desktop, realistic expectation.

00:20:34:26 – 00:20:51:19
Speaker 5
There is also work on other tracking algorithms. I believe that Ms. has one that they’re working on. It’s probably not going to be one of the first products out. And I don’t know exactly what the plans are for that, but that is the, Brian, I remember what it’s called.

00:20:51:21 – 00:21:25:15
Speaker 1
Well, the first, the first Ms. product is going to be a, flash density of the NLB in cloud, the ground data. And then, Kenneth Howard tells me that by the MOOC, which I think is a great point, operating capability. But that’s all in March of next year. So by March of, 2015, they hope to have more than just the cloud, the ground, data going into the Ms. lightning grids.

00:21:25:23 – 00:21:42:01
Speaker 1
So but then the other question will be whether they mass lightning grids make it to hell in that time frame. So right now they are they are expected to. But that’s kind of a wait and see.

00:21:42:03 – 00:22:02:12
Speaker 5
Right. What I was also talking about there was a different storm tracking algorithm, scan users get which runs on the RPG. Ms. has one that they’ve it’s called K-means. But there’s another name for that they’re using, and I can’t remember what that is. But it does like blob tracking instead of this nice neat circular storm cell tracking that.

00:22:02:12 – 00:22:07:24
Speaker 1
Skip uses. Yeah. There’s a name here that can have a segue motion. Yes.

00:22:07:24 – 00:22:08:08
Speaker 5
Thank you.

00:22:08:13 – 00:22:15:09
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. That was, algorithm, developed that an SSL.

00:22:15:11 – 00:22:23:25
Speaker 5
So I don’t know if it was developed at an SSL, but it was, it was implemented in meteorology at a so I think it was used for other things.

00:22:23:28 – 00:22:37:07
Speaker 1
Right. Okay. Thanks, guys. Okay. So any anything else? All right. Any any, questions or comments? Tom.

00:22:37:09 – 00:23:05:10
Speaker 5
I do have another one to mention about, the definition of a lightning jump in the use of a two sigma algorithm. The two sigma algorithm was, you could call it, fine tuned based on an entirely different data source. The LMI data source. And the behavior of the LMS is different enough from any or NLB in that, you need to be really careful about just transporting that two sigma two sigma algorithm into this new data set.

00:23:05:12 – 00:23:26:15
Speaker 5
It’s probably not going to behave the same. And so there’s still a desire out there to analyze that, you know, data in this manner to come up with a lightning algorithm. But it might not be two sigma. It could have some slightly different characteristics that are at least based on, the study that, you know, optimizes the the performance of it as a predictor of severe weather.

00:23:26:17 – 00:23:43:29
Speaker 5
So, I don’t know, I can’t necessarily look at any particular, you know, plot like this and, and say, oh, here’s where it would be different. I can’t say that I don’t know, but it might show some slightly different, information. So I believe that lightning jump was evaluated.

00:23:43:29 – 00:23:44:08
Speaker 1
At.

00:23:44:26 – 00:24:00:25
Speaker 5
The, houses where the test bed this year. But I don’t know what’s going to happen in regards to any data or other data networks and how an official lightning algorithm would be applied to it.

00:24:00:27 – 00:24:05:26
Speaker 1
Right. So there may be something like a three sigma or a for certain.

00:24:05:29 – 00:24:07:26
Speaker 5
Right. 2.7 sigma.

00:24:07:28 – 00:24:18:10
Speaker 1
Right. Some other variant of Sigma. So that remains to be seen. But it’s a work in progress. So.

00:24:18:12 – 00:24:40:09
Speaker 3
Word to the wise. Yeah. There’s, this is al again. Yeah. There’s, I think there’s a lot of work to be done to figure out how to make the best use of, lightning data and operations. I think it will be. It’ll be great to have it. And they want to be able to use it in real time and say, you know what works and what doesn’t.

00:24:40:09 – 00:25:04:19
Speaker 3
And I and and I guess we should we should also mention that there is a satellite aspect to this, that, the next year goes the Goes-r satellite will have a lightning sensor on board, and we’ll get we’ll get another kind of, total lightning data set from that. And we’ll have to, you know, see what the characteristics of that data set are.

00:25:04:19 – 00:25:07:16
Speaker 3
They’ll probably be different from.

00:25:07:18 – 00:25:08:15
Speaker 1
And I.

00:25:08:15 – 00:25:20:02
Speaker 3
And different from the OMA. So it’ll be it’ll be a challenge to, you know, make use of all the different data sets and, in the best fashion.

00:25:20:19 – 00:25:28:19
Speaker 5
To be clear. And, Brian, correct me if I’m wrong, but the the Go’s lightning mapper is a gridded product only. Isn’t that right?

00:25:28:22 – 00:26:03:09
Speaker 1
Well, it it actually is a point data set, but. And the way it’s going to be displayed on any website, it’ll be, displayed as a flash density. There’s there’s groups. And what is it? Groups, flashes and events. So there’s three different quantities of the instrument’s sensors. And what will turn that into something equivalent to a flash density and your flash extended density, which, is what we expect the forecasters with utilize.

00:26:03:11 – 00:26:25:25
Speaker 5
But when it when it comes to tracking a storm cell and associating attributes to it, it becomes a little bit different when you’re dealing with gridded lightning data only because what you can only associate to that storm cell might be your maximum flash density, that necessarily the rate within the sphere of influence of that storm cell, which is what the lightning jump tries to to make use of.

00:26:25:25 – 00:26:28:20
Speaker 5
So again, another little difference there.

00:26:28:22 – 00:27:07:20
Speaker 1
Right. They are different. But I think, you know, pretty quickly there’ll be, some sort of expert, lightning analysis that merges lightning from one or more ground based networks with the space based network or the space based sensor and goes-r. And then, you know, hopefully that merged, merged expert product is what forecasters will be getting through mass or some other way, to utilize and, mass frequency or something on the order of two minutes.

00:27:07:20 – 00:27:16:25
Speaker 1
So it’ll be, rapidly updated. Okay. If there are any more questions, we’ll close it off here.