In this video we're going to practice some true data integration using the standard environmental data packages and pop-up skew-T with radar data. 

So under our scale menu, let's go to WFO scale. And the frames count we'll go to 64 frames so we can load our all tilts kcri. Under the kcri menu we'll load the all tilts base data. When that comes up, we'll go into the volume menu, and we'll go down to the standard environmental data package menu. And we're gonna select RAP13 for our standard environmental data package since our LAPS data isn't good in this case. And RAP is a suitable data source to use for the standard environmental data packages. In addition to the standard environmental data packages, we will go to the volume menu, and we'll load the pop up skew-T. And we can right-click on the background after loading the pop up skew-T and under sample cloud heights, we're gonna select RAP as the source. So now as we sample values here, our pop up skew-T is going to indicate the height of the radar beam where the data is being, the environmental data is being projected to the plane of the radar tilts. 

So let's go ahead and with the left mouse button we will toggle off the humidity display. We don't need to see that. And with the up arrow we will hit the up arrow once and then the dot key on the keypad to go to 0.5 degrees. And we are going to pay attention to this storm in southwest Oklahoma. Kind of want the smaller storm. Let's check out what it looks like. Well if we just put our sampling on that storm and I'm gonna double click and hold on my, on my storm to sample that. If I tilt upward then we see that the dot on the skew-T is going to be indicating the height of the observation of the radar data. We see the temperatures are being plotted in isotherms in the plane of the radar tilts. And we see we're at 11 Celsius here. As we keep tilting upward, we're going to be at colder and colder temperatures. Now we're getting to the freezing level we see with the dashed line indicate temperatures below freezing. As we keep tilting up we see that we have high reflectivity for this storm that go well up into upper levels. So we have some areas here of 54 dBZ at 37,000 feet and minus 48 Celsius. 

So if we look at some of these values, we can start to piece together a little bit of the environment and what's going on with the, with these observations. We see we have 61 dBZ at minus 40 Celsius. So anything colder than minus 40 is going to be, it's going to be solid ice. Now one thing we can see if we look at our pop-up skew-T, even though the environment may be minus 40 Celsius. If we look at the purple line here indicating the parcel curve of the cloud temperatures, they could be almost 12 or 13 Celsius warmer than the environment because we're in a very high cape environment. So even though this says minus 40 Celsius is the temperature of the environment at that level. If these, if this hail here, which if it's 60 dBZ, then it's going to be hail. And it's suspended aloft. It's probably inside updraft. Then that is going to be, even though it says it's minus 40 Celsius, it could be minus 28 Celsius if it's in that really warm updraft core. So this kind of helps us kind of interpret what some of the environment conditions could be as well as some of the cloud conditions could be with the storm. 

Alright, so let's go ahead and if we want to again look at reflectivity maybe a little bit more zoomed in we can hit the 1 key on the keyboard in the upper left to zoom in. Go ahead and sample out some of these values. We see we're down low here on the pop up skew-T, down right near cloud base. We've got reflectivities that become greater than 60 dBZ right off the deck. As we keep tilting up we notice that as the temperature is approached the freezing level, they actually decrease. So all those high reflectivities are really below the freezing level. That's suggesting that melting hail is probably going on in that location. As we keep tilting up we see some high reflectivities in upper levels. And there's their storm top. And we can see that we're just above the equilibrium level here. Let's tilt downward to 0.5 degrees. And we can hit the dot key on the keypad to toggle over to velocity. Let's look at our velocity interpretation as it relates to the pop up skew-T. Well, we see there's some inbound velocities on this side of the storm. It's kind of this LP-ish looking storm. And there's some cyclonic shear in here with the radar being up to the right. So these are inbound velocities. So we have inbound velocities and maybe some cyclonic shear out here, but we have to keep tilting up before we're gonna be for sure. So these are pretty weak reflectivities out here. Only 4 dB. So it's kind of hard to trust this. But that's kind of where we would expect to see some cyclonic shear in in this kind of environment. So this could be some cyclonic shear with this storm. 

But once we get up into mid levels at 15,000 feet, we see that there's really not a lot of organized rotation. There's some cyclonic shear maybe a little bit better defined when we get up to 20,000 feet. And we have some cyclonic shear in here with 30 knot inbounds and 27 so that's 57. 58 divided by 2 is 29 knot rotational velocities. So these are, you know, at 55 nautical miles, it's a relatively close. So it's minimal mesocyclone strength. And just some fairly disorganized cyclonic shear and when we get up into upper levels, 30,000 feet, becomes very disorganized. And then we get into some different patterns aloft, which let's go ahead and do a storm top divergence look. 

So we tilt downward. I'm going to start down at 0.5 degrees and then let's tilt all the way up to storm top. Once we get up the storm top, then we can toggle over to velocity and see we have inbound velocities on one side going to the Northeast. Outbound going to the southwest on the other. So we have storm top divergence of let's see 35. There's a 37 there. 37 and 50 is gonna be a 88 knot Delta V. Which, you know, 70 to 100 knots can can be kind of supportive of one inch, one inch hail. So if we tilt up again and go to the very tip of the storm top, it's barely getting sampled because it's relatively small. We can look at the divergence signature across that as well. We see 40 and 40 is 80 lnot Delta V. So it's consistently a decent storm top divergence, but nothing really that significant from a storm top divergence perspective. The high reflectivities to the highest heights are kind of the thing that stand out the most at this point. Well let's go ahead and check out what the dual pol variables now will say. So we can hit the end key in the upper right part of the keyboard to go back to our 4 panel layout. Hit the dot key on the keypad to go over to reflectivity. We've got reflectivity on the upper left and zdr on the upper right and we are at 0.5 degrees. So what is our zdr tell us? Well we have zdr's that are about 4 dDB. There's a 5 dB in there. These areas of reduced zdr's are still decently positive at 1.5. So we have very high zdr's indicating probably melting drops. And you know they're nice big size drops that are oblate that are giving a lot more power return in the horizontal. So if we look at our lower left we see that there is some kdp that's two degrees per kilometer, and that could be associated with heavier rain. So some of these areas with high zdr's in low levels are likely some rain, some large raindrops. So if we tilt upward we see that these high zdr's are actually becoming negative, but the temperatures are still around 10 Celsius. So if we're getting these zdr's around here are minus 0.3 near 0 zdr's with temperatures above freezing. This is 10 Celsius now in areas of high reflectivity. Then this is an indication of hail, nearly circular hail. 

So if we keep tilting up until we get to the freezing level. This is important now. Most of the zdr's should go to 0 or negative. We see this area up to the northwest here on the part on this northwestern part of the storm where we've got 3.8 dB at 0 Celsius. We keep tilting up, we see those almost 5 dB at minus 13 Celsius. So we have high zdr and temperatures that are clearly colder than than zero in the environment. If we go down to our pop up skew-T, we see that it could be a little bit below freezing there if it's just inside the the updraft. But it's definitely a zdr column, and that's indicating suspended liquid water drops that are at the freezing level or likely colder than freezing. We even have positive zdr's of 1.7 all the way to minus 27 Celsius of the environment. And if we look at our pop up skew-T over here, we can see that could be minus 10 Celsius inside cloud if we're in the center of that updraft core. So this is a kind of a well-defined zdr column indicating a suspended liquid water droplets by a fairly intense updraft and that's supporting some hail growth as we even see in the zdr in some parts of lower levels. 

Well, let's move from the zdr and the upper right now to the correlation coefficient in the lower right. And one of the things that stands out immediately are these greens, correlation coefficients of 0.83. Now anything less than 0.9 if it's in high reflectivity, which if we look in the upper left we see it's 54.5 dBZ. So this is the smoking gun of large hail. Once we get into to the different scattering regimes that are associated with large hail, then it can be larger than golf balls. Usually start to have these kind of signatures of very low correlation coefficients in very high reflectivity areas. Our kdp's are dropping out because our correlations are less than 0.9. So we kind of expect that. So let's go ahead and tilt up and see how the correlation coefficients changing. Well as we get up to the, we're still at +10 celsius, we see that that correlation coefficient signature is now, it's more like 0.98. So it's really looks to be, you know, a mix of size distributions down low in this different scattering regime. That's likely hail, that's probably larger than golf balls. Once we go up into mid levels, we see a little bit of that low correlation coefficient signature, 0.86 up to 15,000 feet and right about the freezing level. But it's, it's yeah 0.88 up to minus 27 Celsius. So there's some correlation coefficient signature up in the mid levels, but it's fairly small. And the big signature is this 0.5. Degree CC's that are that are 0.83 and this is a smoking gun of large hail. 

One last look at the kdp's on the lower left show us that we've got some areas of heavy rain in low levels. We tilt up, there about a little less than 1 so very significant. But we do see some areas of kdp, which is going to be liquid precip in the zdr column extending up into mid levels, minus 14 Celsius and then not much aloft. So we see that we can bring together a lot of different environmental perspectives into the radar data with the standard environmental data packages and the pop up skew-T. In the last five minutes, I think a baseball-sized hail report was was happening. We also had hail sizes of 2 to 2.75 inches in the last half hour. So this was a productive large hail producing storm that really didn't have very classic rotation in mid levels. Wasn't very strong, but still a strong updraft and we saw fairly strong signals in the integrated radar sampling of a significant hail producing storm.