Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:04 – 00:00:20:12
Speaker 1
Begin here. And we’re pleased to have, Jason Jordan with us, who is, senior meteorologist at National Weather Service, Lubbock WFO. And he’s going to talk about, their lightning mapping array and look at some examples of, using that and, West Texas. So I’ll, I’ll turn it over to, Jason at this time.

00:00:20:14 – 00:00:43:13
Speaker 2
All right. Thank you very much. And, Scott Laski, if you you saw this presentation already at the meeting, just to give you a heads up, I really haven’t changed anything in it. If you really want to sit through it again another time. But, we’re here to talk about how we use the West Texas lightning mapping array here, and, the weather service in Lubbock.

00:00:43:15 – 00:01:05:27
Speaker 2
And what we’ll cover today is, take a look at the Elmo description for West Texas. How we get the data into our office. More convoluted. Go through three cases real quick. What if convicted of evolution? Want to thundersnow here in Lubbock and and also how we use it for decision support, of some, future and collaborative research that we’ll continue doing with Texas Tech.

00:01:05:27 – 00:01:30:17
Speaker 2
And so in conclusions from that. So how do we get the data? Well, Texas Tech has gone out and deployed, several of these element sites across West Texas and each of these transmits data back to the Texas Tech server on the, in the atmospheric science group, through cell phone networks, they take all those packets and aggregate them on one machine.

00:01:30:19 – 00:01:52:00
Speaker 2
And then from there, you end up locating the sources. And sources are the electrical discharges that take place in thunderstorms. And then from there, it goes out in two different ways. The first way is out through a WebSocket server that goes through the internet, through the National Weather Service firewall, and then drops it to our office. And that’s the way that we primarily look at the data.

00:01:52:02 – 00:02:18:14
Speaker 2
The second way that we look at it, here hopefully soon, is that, those products get sent out for the web page for hopefully are able to here soon and be LDM every minute. Also through the firewall and comes in there now the first one that we use here, the WebSocket. Basically what happens is that all this data from Texas Tech comes in on one link to one Linux box in our office.

00:02:18:17 – 00:02:43:04
Speaker 2
We then take that information and rebroadcast it out using a program called so Cat. And the advantage of doing that is that it allows the live element display software to connect to one server at any PC in our office. So that way we’re not having multiple connections from our office go out across the internet. It basically is one connection inside our office to rebroadcast the display data to any PC.

00:02:43:06 – 00:03:04:04
Speaker 2
The second way we hope to use here soon because we now have a website too, is that through LVM, we can actually get group two data ingested into a website in, almost real time. And that allows us to go in and do multiple things. We can put it into other groups software. But again, our hope is that we can start getting it into our two system here soon.

00:03:04:06 – 00:03:21:03
Speaker 2
Now, this is a little small loop. It’ll take a little bit to load. And what this does is this displays, pretty much the latency of the system and how we get the data into the office. On the left is a view from one of our tower cameras here at the forecast office. And on the right is a live element display software.

00:03:21:06 – 00:03:41:15
Speaker 2
And, you’ll see a flash on the left. And then about a second or two later, you see all these little sources pop up in the live bill, and they display. And that latency has been about inconsistently been about 1 or 2 seconds. So it’s pretty much in real time, even though it’s having to bounce all the way through the different networks and back into our office.

00:03:41:18 – 00:03:59:20
Speaker 2
And it’s great. It works pretty much almost all the time now. One of the problems that we had initially that’s been fixed here recently is that since all this data is going out during a cell phone network, most of these cell phone sites are set up through Verizon. And if you notice up here at the top, this is a time series plot.

00:03:59:20 – 00:04:30:21
Speaker 2
And right about 11 V somewhere between 11 and 15 seeing you notice that all these sources start to drop out. And what’s, what’s ended up happening is that right about here is where all the students at Texas Tech start waking up, and everybody across Lubbock starts waking up. And one of the things that’s in the agreement with Verizon on the cell phone network is that since they use static IP addresses to send the data back to Texas Tech, that bandwidth gets throttled.

00:04:30:24 – 00:04:53:14
Speaker 2
Now, that means that we can have a line of storms, as was the case here moving into the area. And it would appear, based on the source data, that they’re actually weakening because the number of sources are dropping off. But then here, shortly after 1230 UTC, we see that the sources magically pick up again. And what has happened is that Verizon removed the bandwidth throttling, and now we’re getting a full data feed back into our office.

00:04:53:16 – 00:05:12:05
Speaker 2
As I said, this was a problem last year, but, Texas Tech has gone back in and worked with Verizon and also changed the way that they send data back to Texas Tech to avoid this problem. And pretty much for the last three quarters of last year, and this did not happen at all. We had a continuous data feed that was working great.

00:05:12:08 – 00:05:40:02
Speaker 2
So here’s the start of the first case that we’ll be looking at. This is a case of convective evolution. And for us, it’s been able to be able to date has been able to give us an indication of where in the convective evolution scheme, things are, it could be early on in the initiation stage how it develops to the mature stage, and also in the dissipating stage, each of those three classically defined, areas in thunderstorm development each have their own unique signatures that we’ve been able to pull out.

00:05:40:02 – 00:06:01:27
Speaker 2
Looking at the source data from the LNA. Now, the flip side is that there can sometimes be so many sources coming in that it’s hard to pick out all of the details. And one of the things that some of the forecasters happened upon accidentally is the log density plots in the software, and those can show some regions that are needing, more inspection.

00:06:02:00 – 00:06:04:26
Unknown
So the first case of convective evolution, what we’re looking.

00:06:04:26 – 00:06:31:20
Speaker 2
At is a case where we had a tropical environment across our, warning area, and we ended up with two supercells that started to develop. The first one, was this storm up here to the north. And this was the initial storm that was anchored on an outflow boundary. And then a second storm started to develop off to the southwest and eventually became the dominant storm, so that we could see how the two interacted and also some phases in between the development in the Louisville and a.

00:06:31:23 – 00:06:53:18
Speaker 2
So this is what the Live Element display looks like. For those that aren’t familiar, there’s different plots that we’re looking at up here at the top. This is a time series of, the sources just looking at a given interval that you can select, which in our case is usually a ten minute window. You have a cross-section, composite of sources in the east west direction here.

00:06:53:21 – 00:07:15:21
Speaker 2
You have a histogram here of all the, sources and whether they’re most dense. This gives you a rough idea of what the charge structure can be. And storms, but it’s more for use in research. If you really haven’t applied this part in operations yet, then you have your North-South, oriented, composite cross-section. And then of course, your plan view here.

00:07:15:23 – 00:07:39:25
Speaker 2
So from 2010 to 2020 UTC, we have two different storms. You can see, the first one, up to the north, has quite a few sources, but we’re also seeing sources starting to extend off to the north. And again, sources in the storm to the south. They’re pretty well balanced. With time, you can see that there’s a few more sources starting to show up in the southern storm.

00:07:39:27 – 00:08:04:28
Speaker 2
And as we move forward, another ten minutes from 2020 to 2030 UTC, the northern storm is starting to lose a lot of the sources, and we’re seeing a significant increase in the number of sources there right along the four county border area. What was happening at this time is that the northern storm was starting to get, to the west of the leading edge of the outflow boundary, and was starting to get undercut by outflow from its own storm.

00:08:05:01 – 00:08:24:16
Speaker 2
And then the southern storm actually started to strengthen and started to anchor back on to the outflow boundary again. In order to save time. I don’t have the radar images to show you that, but if need be, we can go back later. I think I do have, the presentation just hit jumping forward another ten minutes from 2013 to 2040 UTC.

00:08:24:18 – 00:08:49:09
Speaker 2
You can see that up here, the northern storm has pretty much dissipated. There’s no sources. These were about, 6 to 8 minutes inside this time frame. However, the southern storm, it’s starting to take off, and we’re also starting to see both the concentration of sources here at the center of the storm. But there are also some sources starting to extend down in the anvil region.

00:08:49:11 – 00:09:12:04
Speaker 2
The way that we can tell that is looking at the cross-section is with, starting to see sources. Oriented out here, which we are on leading edge and also in the East-West oriented cross section, you can see some sources coming out. And what would be the whole region now, the next one here, 2014 and 2015 UTC?

00:09:12:07 – 00:09:34:12
Speaker 2
We’ve pretty much lost the northern storm. The southern storm is now the dominant storm. We can see that there are a lot of sources located, where updraft region would be. But then again, some sources starting to develop out in the anvil regions. And this is the point that I was trying to say that sometimes the storms can be so electrically active that we lose a lot of the definition in what’s happening in the updraft.

00:09:34:15 – 00:09:59:22
Speaker 2
They’re pretty much concentrated right around the core of the storm. And I’ll show you why the log density plots are important here in just a second. Now, another thing that happened to 2015 to 21, you can see is that, this is the time that the mesocyclone was at its strongest. And if you notice that we’ve lost the strong core of the storms, here at the center of the storm.

00:09:59:22 – 00:10:20:17
Speaker 2
But we also see that there’s a sort of a void area in here, and a lot of sources have extended off to the northern and northeastern part of that storm, and even a few sources starting to take place over here, right on the edge of the back. Sheared anvil. What happened at that time? And as a cyclone developed, we ended up going ahead and issuing a severe thunderstorm warning for that time.

00:10:20:21 – 00:10:43:20
Speaker 2
And then in the next window, the 21 to 2010 2110 UTC window. We’ve lost a lot of the concentration of sources that they’ve kind of are, oriented more across the entire storm. There’s not one area that looks in particular like there’s more sources, than in another. But then in the next window, the 21, 10 to 2128 DC, we can see again.

00:10:43:20 – 00:11:03:16
Speaker 2
But now all of a sudden, we’re starting to see sources concentrate in one part of the storm. Sources associated with the second updraft pulse. Now, I’d mentioned earlier that one of the things that we had accidentally stumbled upon is the log density plot. And what the difference here now is, as opposed to plotting the individual sources that were taking place with the electrical activity.

00:11:03:18 – 00:11:27:22
Speaker 2
It’s looking at just a log density plot, so you’re not actually seeing the actual sources. You’re looking at where most of the sources are occurring. And with time again, you can see that as the northern storm develops and loses a lot of the sort of intensity profile that then we can see that, with time, the southern storm, as it continues to increase, the sources are pretty well concentrated around the updraft.

00:11:27:25 – 00:11:47:19
Speaker 2
And then we get to the 2015 to 21. You can see this one again, shows pretty clearly that there’s a minimum area around the updraft in and around. And as a cyclone. And it’s not just in this case that we’ve seen it. There was another case back in 2012, supercell here across the city of Lubbock that had the same feature.

00:11:47:21 – 00:12:08:17
Speaker 2
And there was also a case for in the Dallas-Fort worth metroplex, where a supercell was over the, by solo, Eldora network. And they also saw the same thing when the updraft and the mesocyclone were at the strongest. A lot of the electrical sources get sort of, moved to the outer edge of the, center of the circulation of another cyclone.

00:12:08:20 – 00:12:28:09
Speaker 2
So this is one of the indications that we can start to see that are associated with, strong thunderstorm updrafts and, rotating updrafts. Is that, once we start to see this kind of ring form within the storm, that’s a pretty good indication that the mesocyclone is at its strongest and a pretty good, precursor for severe weather.

00:12:28:12 – 00:12:50:16
Speaker 2
Now, changing, the time window a little bit. This is looking at almost an hour and a half worth of data for the southern storm. And one thing that I wanted to point out here is that if you look at the very top flight words, the altitude and time series, if you notice that there’s oriented lines with time where you can sort of see the sources and the density plots are starting to move up.

00:12:50:19 – 00:13:13:16
Speaker 2
And this is also associated with updraft pulses within the storm. And we can go back and look at that, with the radar data. And it correlates really nicely as we can see, some of the stronger cores get lofted, for a time. The second thing is, if you notice up here at the very top, you can sort of see that, there’s a source of there taking place and it sort of forms a wavelike pattern.

00:13:13:18 – 00:13:34:18
Speaker 2
What we’re starting to see in these cases right here is that when the updraft reaches its maximum and we’re getting a lot of, ice crystals and even some water vapor at the very top of the storm. In overshooting top, we get a lot of uncorrelated sources taking place. And from a different case, totally in a different, display software, but the same thing.

00:13:34:18 – 00:13:52:19
Speaker 2
Time to the top. This is not a supercell storm, but this is an ordinary type of thunderstorm. Airmass thunderstorm that took place at about six in the morning. Early on, there was not a lot of electrical activity. But then as the storm started to strengthen, you can see it, gets a lot of sources down here below five kilometers.

00:13:52:19 – 00:14:13:19
Speaker 2
But then also source is starting to take place, associated with lightning activity at the top of the storm. And when the storm reached its peak, we’re getting a lot of these, sources at the top that are uncorrelated, and then they disappear once the storm starts to weaken and we lose that activity. So that’s also some of the things that we can use to see the trends in convection with time.

00:14:13:22 – 00:14:37:19
Speaker 2
Case two we actually had a case of thundersnow here and a lot of last year, and it was the first time that we were actually able to see electrical activity in, winter weather event. We had had a strong cold front push across the area the models had forecasted. So somewhere, but we had different of anywhere from 50 to 100km where the heaviest snow bands which set up the environment did have some weak, elevated instability.

00:14:37:22 – 00:14:58:07
Speaker 2
But we also had the main storm system approaching. There was a pretty strong trough. And so we had temperatures, profiles that were falling below freezing both aloft and at the surface. So early on. This was taken in about 11:00 pm Central Standard Time. Five Z the area up here across the north eastern part of our CWA was all snow.

00:14:58:09 – 00:15:21:15
Speaker 2
You know, temperatures were right at or just above freezing. The the area that I want you to focus on is down here to the southeast of Lubbock in this area of, developing activity. What time we started to see enhanced reflectivity values just to the south of our CWA that were moving in. And shortly after this radar image, at 510 UTC, we had our first flash at 528.

00:15:21:18 – 00:15:42:25
Speaker 2
Now, this was not a cloud to ground strike. We didn’t have any detection of that in the in LPA network. But, the ILM did see the source take place. The second thing I want to point out is that we did not have lightning when they open at this time, because we were not expecting convective cells. Moving forward another, 20 minutes, again, here’s the initial flash.

00:15:42:25 – 00:16:10:09
Speaker 2
At 528, we started to pick up a few more sources, and then right before 540 UTC, we started to see a broad uptick in activity associated with that band to the southeast of Lubbock. Shortly after that, when the next radar image came in at 541 UTC, the the excuse me, the little visa network finally showed three ground negative strikes and that was our first indication that we actually had electrical activity taking place.

00:16:10:12 – 00:16:33:27
Speaker 2
The second thing I want to point out is that we not only have this band here starting to set up, but we had a second band setting up just in southeast of the first one, and that one did not have much electrical activity compared to the northern band. So that allowed us to sort of hone in on where the most intense updrafts were, where the enhanced snowfall rates could take place, and with time, you can continue to see if the southern band didn’t have much activity.

00:16:33:27 – 00:16:55:00
Speaker 2
And then the northern band continued to take off. Now, this will probably take a little bit of time to load. Hopefully you can see it. It’s just a loop with time. You’re looking at ten minute windows of LNA data over about a three hour period. So you can see that there was a lot of electrical activity center just to the southeast of Lubbock with that first band.

00:16:55:02 – 00:17:19:08
Speaker 2
The second band really didn’t produce much. And so at time, you can also see that the sources were starting to spread out and so had a few lightning strikes taking place. But overall, the electrical activity started to decrease. Now, the nice thing with that is that it correlated with the heaviest snowfall that we got in this event about, anywhere from 6 to 10in where that band initially set up.

00:17:19:10 – 00:17:40:10
Speaker 2
So that’s one of the utilities that we found with the OMA, hopefully. And maybe if we get some more winter weather, we can see if this is possible. But by identifying where the strongest updrafts are, that allows us to hone in our forecast. And actually we did update once we saw there were convective that’s starting to set up and up to snowfall amounts where the heaviest snow was going to fall.

00:17:40:13 – 00:18:05:21
Speaker 2
Case three we use it for decision support several times, mainly for airport operations. They like the fact that we can see lightning activity and electrical activity in storms. There have been a few events over at Texas Tech that the Atmospheric Science Group has coordinated with us that they’ve used, to help with NCAA, especially the football events, and then also just general outdoor activities when we have, in the summer, a lot of people at the civic poles calling want to know what’s going on.

00:18:05:23 – 00:18:24:11
Speaker 2
So in this example for airport operations, we got a phone call right about 7 p.m. and the importance of that is that, Lubbock International Airport is a regional hub for Fedex. So they fly in a 737 loaded with, packages. And the airport operations manager called us saying that he could see lightning off to the west. The storms were dissipating with time.

00:18:24:11 – 00:18:47:23
Speaker 2
The outflow boundary had kicked out from underneath the storms. And you can also see that there’s some electrical activity taking place quite a few sources, but not anything that’s concentrated in one area. They’re pretty well dispersed. And so we said, well, you know, you do have some lightning activity moving in. We are getting some ground strikes. We can also see that there’s still electrical activity taking place in the storm.

00:18:47:25 – 00:19:07:00
Speaker 2
Jumping forward about an hour and ten minutes. The activity was starting to approach Lubbock, but we lost a lot of the ground on, cloud to ground strikes. So the airport calls us up saying we haven’t seen any lightning hit the ground. Is it okay for us to get our, ground crews out and, get our ground operations restarted?

00:19:07:03 – 00:19:23:21
Speaker 2
And we said, well, you may want to hang on a little bit longer. We’re still seeing some electrical activity. However, you can see between the two images that the number of sources have decreased significantly. And, so we said, well, you know, give it about another 10 to 15 minutes just to make sure all the electrical activity has moved far enough away from the airport.

00:19:23:21 – 00:19:40:28
Speaker 2
And then you can restart ground operations. So this has helped us quite a bit with narrowing down the time ranges that we can tell airports when and where they can see electrical activity, and also tell them that yes, there’s still a threat, even though you haven’t seen any ground strikes, there’s still electrical activity in the storm, and you need to be aware of that.

00:19:41:01 – 00:20:11:00
Speaker 2
Using what to do is a lot to see how the FAA is rerouting traffic. You can see here some sources. These lines right here are associated with aircraft tracks flying through the anvil region. And the LMA network is sensitive enough that it can pick up the corona discharge on the aircraft. So not only does that let us, calibrate the LMA, we can go in and look at the flight tracking software on available online to see the altitude these flights to make sure that it’s within a reasonable range.

00:20:11:00 – 00:20:30:28
Speaker 2
And then we can alert Texas Tech if we see anything that’s called the ordinary. And sometimes we do see something out of the ordinary. Off to the southeast of Lubbock is a military operations area. And when this was occurring, there were thunderstorms that were potentially going to move into our area of response building. We saw this signature, and it’s like, what the heck is going on there?

00:20:31:00 – 00:20:54:25
Speaker 2
And sure enough, the military was out there, basically having an aircraft doing a figure eights to the southeast of Lubbock waiting for it to clear the airport at Dyess to, land back there so we can see interesting stuff like that as well. Again, for the Texas Tech, athletics site. This is the part of the campus where they have the outdoor tennis, soccer, softball facilities.

00:20:54:27 – 00:21:12:03
Speaker 2
And compared to the football stadium, there’s really not a lot of places for, spectators to go and get cover if there were thunderstorms moving in. So the enemy does allow us to give, quite a bit of leeway and lead time as to where and where electrical activity may take place, to give them a heads up of what’s going on.

00:21:12:06 – 00:21:31:27
Speaker 2
And the atmospheric science group actually used the Army to go ahead and postpone a football game for an hour and a half, based on the data they were seeing coming in. And we coordinated our products with them, in order to give the best information out at Texas Tech. So some future research that we’re looking at, we’re going to start looking at lightning flash sizes.

00:21:31:27 – 00:21:50:09
Speaker 2
There’s been some hints that that’s going to be important. That’s research that Doctor Bruning at Texas Tech is doing well. Also, hopefully we can start comparing it with the Earth Network’s Total Lightning Network. And then we also have some different display tools that’ll be coming up. We do finally have a website soon. It arrived, a couple of weeks ago, and it’s finally fully operational.

00:21:50:12 – 00:22:10:20
Speaker 2
This is some preliminary work that we did with NASA. So in getting that group to date into our office, this is a top left pane is a one minute loop of the flash rate composite. And then the two radar images, top right is bottom left is Midland. And then the hydro meteor classification algorithm off to the bottom right.

00:22:10:23 – 00:22:34:06
Speaker 2
So with the main data we’re getting one minute updates which is nice because that fills in a lot of the gaps with the volume scans on the Ada being in both, not just our radar, but nearby radars, I mentioned that we can hopefully compare it with the average to, total lightning plug in that will be coming out soon to hopefully be able to display the source data from the Earth Network’s, lightning detection network.

00:22:34:08 – 00:22:52:29
Speaker 2
And this is a rough comparison. And the reason we’re looking forward to that is since the lightning in May, software is running off of a PC on the side, it’ll be really nice to have it on the website display so that we can look at both of them at the same time. So, the atmo, late has been most helpful in our operations.

00:22:52:29 – 00:23:15:10
Speaker 2
We really like having the live data. It’s been invaluable. Like I said, we had a few problems, but they’ve been far, few and far between and have been fixed. We think that the total lightning plug ins should help with the workload. And then we think that even though we’ll be able to start getting some of the gridded products in the Ellipse Tool, we still think that forecasters will continue to use the lightning when they display software.

00:23:15:12 – 00:23:41:08
Speaker 2
Is they’re pretty comfortable with it, the use of it. And then, again, hopefully as we start getting some of these additional new fields from Texas Tech developed and into, it looks to we can start using some of those to help with our operations as well. And with that, I ran a little bit long, but we do have some time for questions.

00:23:41:11 – 00:24:10:03
Speaker 2
This is, George in Topeka, your airport in Lubbock. Did you typically have conversations about, lightning affecting the airport prior to having this LMA data, or is this something new since FEMA came in, we did have conversations, especially since we had the, you know, the end data coming in. It’s just allowed us to, to better explain.

00:24:10:03 – 00:24:38:02
Speaker 2
And I probably didn’t say clear enough. One of the things that they do that happens out there is that when they have people out on the tarmac, they can hear thunder, but they may not see a ground strike. And they get real nervous about that because, hopefully we’ve trained them well enough that even though if you hear thunder, there’s so if there’s electrical activity taking place, but they don’t like it when they can’t see a ground strike because they think, well, we’re not seeing any ground strikes taking place, we must be okay.

00:24:38:04 – 00:25:03:08
Speaker 2
So we now finally have a tool with the LMA to be able to say yes, you still have electrical activity in the storm. There’s still the potential for ground strikes. So it’s basically helped us narrow down a lot of the lead time and length of time that we have. Interactions with them for when they hold their ground operations, but especially on the tail end, getting them back out on the field, that’s probably where it’s been the biggest help.

00:25:03:10 – 00:25:10:29
Unknown
All right. Thanks.

00:25:11:02 – 00:25:46:27
Speaker 2
Hey, Jason, this is Todd and Emerald. Excellent presentation. Great job. Hey, I got a question about, you know, we’re anticipating the Pantech LMA will go online up here and, you know, we’re way less familiar with this in Amarillo because we’re just on the 2D periphery of the the West Texas, LMA, you know, scope their range. So I’m curious if you’re getting any insight from Texas Tech, how the, the, Pentax LMA might be integrated and how these networks can, can, kind of be incorporated into, you know, each other and how how that might, may unfold.

00:25:47:00 – 00:26:06:03
Speaker 2
Good question. One of the things that happens with the LMA, since it’s basically a radio receiver, you still have issues with the line of sight. So, just like with the weather radar, the Earth curvature, as it curves away from the sensors, you lose a lot of the low level data. So you’re seeing more of the flashes aloft.

00:26:06:06 – 00:26:32:14
Speaker 2
The nice thing is that, once the Pantech show, when they comes online, and if we can get the networks to communicate to each other, that may be able to fill in, a lot of the low level gaps, especially between Lubbock and Amarillo. There’s also a, an LNA in southwest Oklahoma that, there have been trying to tie the networks together to see if indeed there’s going to be, increases in accuracy.

00:26:32:14 – 00:27:01:09
Speaker 2
And, and also, what you get as far out as Amarillo from Lubbock, which is about 120 miles, mainly are using it for 2D, 2D location. So hopefully once, Pentax comes in, that’ll be able to fill in the 3D locations there of course, to Amarillo and then also get better 3D resolution, especially in the southern part of your CWA in the northern part of Mars.

00:27:01:11 – 00:27:06:05
Speaker 2
Yeah, we’re looking forward to that. Thanks, Jason.

00:27:06:08 – 00:27:12:23
Speaker 1
Okay. Any more questions for Jason?

00:27:12:26 – 00:27:14:19
Speaker 2
Yeah. Hey, Jason, it’s Brian.

00:27:14:21 – 00:27:18:12
Speaker 1
Could you comment on the, the value of the height.

00:27:18:14 – 00:27:27:25
Speaker 2
Information? Yeah. Let me go back to an example real quick.

00:27:27:27 – 00:28:01:25
Speaker 2
I think the two biggest things on the height information are, for us, it’s. Let us see. In this example, let’s see, two things that let’s I see the ten, the trend and the updraft strength. We’ve been able to see a lot of, both the source plots and the log density plots. When we have an updraft pulse, you can pretty well see, here, the strain here.

00:28:01:27 – 00:28:07:29
Speaker 2
On the other.

00:28:08:02 – 00:28:23:05
Speaker 2
Clear these off. You can sort of see where you can, pick out where the updraft strength is starting to pick up, and you’re getting these sources lofted, into the upper levels of the storm. The same thing up here at the top of this one. When you start to see sources taking place that are not very well correlated.

00:28:23:07 – 00:28:45:09
Speaker 2
They’re just up there, kind of like this. It’s also an indication that your storm is probably at its peak intensity and, you know, the trend, especially as it starts trending downward, that’s an area where you may want to focus on that thunderstorm. So that way if the top is starting to collapse, that would be an increased threat for damaging winds down burst, that kind of stuff.

00:28:45:11 – 00:29:12:03
Speaker 2
If it also appear on the uptick, we’re starting to increase. That’s where you could possibly gain some lead time. And we’ve started to try to use this in operations to, to notice when storms are starting to pick up, especially in the strong convection like supercells. So I do think that there is a lot of utility here in the height information.

00:29:12:06 – 00:29:20:10
Speaker 1
Okay. Any more questions?

00:29:20:12 – 00:29:39:26
Speaker 1
Okay. Well, we’ll wrap it up here. And, thank you very much, Jason. I’m going to put this on the visit satellite chat page. The recording of this within the next couple of hours. So, if you want to review this or let others, aware of this presentation, you can check there, a little bit later.

00:29:39:27 – 00:29:43:05
Speaker 1
Well, thank you, Jason. And everybody, have a great day.

00:29:43:07 – 00:29:43:29
Speaker 2
Thank you, thank you.