LightningCast is a product within the ProbSevere portfolio that uses 4 ABI (or AHI) channels to estimate the likelihood of a GLM observation within the next 60 minutes. For the past couple years, this product has been used experimentally over Guam (using Himawari-9 data), even though the product was trained using... Read More
Night Microphysics RGB imagery from the CSPP Geosphere site (link to a very similar animation to the one above) shows a line of tropical cumulus approaching Samoa. There are subtle color changes in that RGB that typically presage convective development (as also shown in this blog post, for example), and as highlighted in the annotated animation below that covers 0830-1230 UTC. The... Read More
The Gálvez-Davison index (GDI) is a useful derived product (available online here from NCEP) for predicting tropical convection in tradewind regimes. In general, the larger the GDI, the more likely that showers and thunderstorms will be present. The toggle above compares GDI with K-Index derived from NUCAPS data (the Sounding Availability plot shows in... Read More
The animation above shows the Nighttime Microphysics RGB (saved from the CSPP Geosphere site) over the islands of American Samoa. (An animated gif is available here). The annotated animation below highlights several features that are typical of convective development detection at night. Low clouds become apparent shortly before 1450 UTC (when they are circled); subsequent color changes in... Read More
