Thunderstorms developed along a SW-NE oriented boundary draped across north-central Oklahoma during the early evening hours of 26 Aug 2019. The storms quickly grew upscale into a Mesoscale Convective System (MCS), and tracked south through central Oklahoma during the night, producing strong/damaging wind gusts and large hail.

One-minute visible imagery from GOES-East clearly shows convergence along a boundary, development of towering cu along the boundary, and eventual convective initiation (Fig 1), all in real-time. Storms quickly reached the equilibrium level and developed overshooting tops (OTs) and above anvil cirrus plumes, indicating particularly robust updrafts. Given the time of day around sunset, the shadows cast on the anvil provide additional insight into the vertical extent of the OTs.

GOES-East IR imagery showed rapid cooling of cloud tops as well as the development of overshooting tops (Fig 2). One method for viewing GOES imagery and GLM fields together in one display is to create a GLM contour color table. Since GLM fields are not gridded data in AWIPS, one cannot easily change it to a contoured field. However, the user can create a color table that implements contours at chosen thresholds instead of a constant fill. This display allows one to view VIS or colored IR imagery and GLM FED data in one display, not needing to make the GLM field semi-transparent. The GLM color table in this example includes three thresholds: 1 Flash/5-min (blue), 25 Flashes/5-min (Cyan), 100 Flashes/5-min (Yellow). For the most part, these solid color contours stand out and do not interfere with the IR colors.

Bill Line, NWS