OCTANE Optical Flow Product Demonstrations at the 2023 Hazardous Weather Testbed: A Developers Perspective

Rapid scan satellite Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R imagery enables methods to extract dense (every image pixel) motions observed from drifts in cloud and water-vapor features, or the Optical Flow. These motions can be blended (or “Sandwiched”) with the 0.64 and 10.3 μm channel brightness from the imagery to view developing and mature deep convection and highlight a) initiation in strong vertical wind shear, and b) cloud-top divergence signals which trend with storm intensity. The Optical flow Code for Tracking, Atmospheric Motion Vector, and Nowcasting Experiments (OCTANE) Speed and Direction sandwich products were developed specifically to highlight these signals and were demonstrated in front of National Weather Service forecasters at the 2023 Hazardous Weather Testbed in Norman, Oklahoma. This presentation will cover how the OCTANE products are created, how these signals are related to storm development and severity, and an overview of the results of these demonstrations from a developer’s perspective. This overview will include interesting phenomena which occurred during the experiment and highlight key results from daily and weekly surveys that will guide future product development. We will emphasize the importance of display techniques on operational utility, and overview key areas for improvement identified in the experiment, such as a) better training on the relevance and relationships of cloud-top divergence to radial divergence signals observed on radar, and b) front-end modifications needed for more intuitive display and sampling capabilities on the AWIPS system, and c) modifying back-end output to produce more opportunities for diurnally independent (infrared only) evaluations in future experiments.