Evaluation of GOES-16 RGB Imagery and Convective Products for Convective Heavy Rainfall Events

As the newest addition to the operational weather satellite suite, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite - 16 (GOES-16) has seen extensive use in operational forecasting. Through marked improvement in spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution, forecasters can now visualize features more easily with GOES-16 than with the legacy GOES satellites. One area in which GOES-16 has become an essential tool is with forecasting convective heavy rainfall. With its improved contrast and decreased data latency, convective events can be tracked in near real time, aiding forecasters in the timely dissemination of Mesoscale Precipitation Discussions (MPDs) from the Weather Prediction Center (WPC). However, the production of convective heavy rainfall and flash flooding by Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCSs) has proven to be a significant forecasting challenge throughout the warm season of 2018. Given the number of events in which high impact flash flooding resulted from a convective heavy rainfall event and the difficulty associated with predicting such an event, additional forecasting tools may be necessary to increase their predictability.

The capabilities of various GOES-16 derived and multispectral products, rather than its individual spectral bands alone, afford the ability to better discern behavior patterns in cases of convective heavy rainfall, allowing forecasters to more accurately assess whether an MCS has the capability of producing a convective heavy rainfall event. Through channel combinations, multispectral or Red-Green-Blue (RGB) imagery can display the interactions of an MCS with its environment before, during, and after a convective heavy rainfall event. These products, combined with other convective products such as lightning density data and overshooting tops algorithms, can provide a higher level of contrast to features that are more subtle in single channel imagery. This would mean that the combination of GOES-16’s RGB Imagery and other satellite convective products would be able to highlight areas of interest sooner and more accurately than single channel imagery alone. Through the use of visual interpretation with the aforementioned products, this presentation will show some unique features associated with convective heavy rainfall events and how forecasters would be able to identify the early indicators of high impact flash flooding.