There was a conditional outlook for severe storms in Oklahoma on April 19th, owing to uncertainty in the forcing for ascent and a stout warm-sector cap. Well, the cap broke, and mayhem ensued in central Oklahoma. A break in the cirrus deck in southwest Oklahoma likely contributed to surface heating... Read More
The NOAA/CIMSS ProbSevere team created a tool to help forecasters monitor the time tendency of lightning potential at a static point. The static points in the map below are mostly civilian airports and army airfields throughout the U.S. From the ProbSevere LightningCast website, a user can toggle on the “Lightning meteograms” layer... Read More
The NOAA/CIMSS ProbSevere LightningCast model uses GOES-R ABI reflectances and brightness temperatures along with artificial intelligence methods to predict next-hour lightning anywhere in the GOES-R field of view. It is particularly adept at nowcasting lightning initiation. A long, potent cold front spawned a number of storms from Iowa to Texas today... Read More
A mid-level atmospheric wave with subtle warm-air advection forced some strong thunderstorms in central Texas this morning. The operational high-resolution convection-allowing NWP models did not handle these storms well at all. ProbSevere LightningCast, an image-based AI model, picked up on the rapidly growing convection about 15-20 minutes before lightning initiation. LightningCast... Read More
