Cooperative Institute for
Meteorological Satellite Studies
CIMSS

PREDICT CIMSS Activities

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September 2, 2010

by: Sarah Monette

Fig1Another day, another flight. Fortunately for me, today’s flight started a little bit later, allowing for more sleep and a walk down the hill in daylight. It didn’t prove to be any less interesting, however. Today the G-5 flew into Tropical Storm Fiona for the last time. As usual, I was doing the nowcasting, informing the plane of various patches of lightning and the occasional overshooting top. Then, this happened (see image). The squares of purple and blue represent five overshoots within a one by one degree box, right in front of the aircraft. I alerted them to this occurrence, received word that they copied, and proceeded to watch them fly right through the convectively active area. Only later did I learn the plane ascended to 48,000 feet to avoid this potential turbulence, so needless to say my heart was pounding for about 5 minutes as I watched the plane maneuver. This also got everyone’s attention in the room.

That wasn’t my only chance to capture the room’s attention. Per usual, a PREDICT forecast discussion was given at 10 am local time (14 Z). Before the discussion (when the plane wasn’t flying through convection), I was given the task to add a bit more information to my overshooting top line plots. I ran a test on one of the current invest areas, with the program indicating the invest had actually developed. Certain my program was wrong, I double-checked with a friend. Sure enough, the invest had developed into a tropical depression, so recently most in the room didn’t even realize it (the National Hurricane Center didn’t announce it until 11 am local time). If there was ever a time to show the higher-ups in the field that you kinda knew what you were talking about, that was it. As if that wasn’t enough, the multi-agency forecast discussion included some of my images (per Chris Velden’s request) followed by an email of thanks from a “major player” at UWash. All in all, I’d say it was a good day.