Next we're gonna practice using the four dimensional storm cell investigator. 

So to do this let's clear our pane and go to WFO scale. And we're gonna load the kcri 0.5z/srm8 just to have something in the background to give us a reference frame from where we want to click. It doesn't have to have any radar data in the background to launch FSI, but it's good to just have a good reference point to start from. So we're gonna go to the Tools menu and we're going to load FSI. 

Now once we load FSI from the menu, WES 2 Bridge has been set up in a specific way to be able to go create the data that it needs to be able to play it back when we're in case review mode. This is unique to WES 2 Bridge. We're gonna click OK on that button. Your machine could take a little bit longer than mine to create that data. WES is gonna pop up a message to tell us when it's done. And you won't see this in a real time AWIPS, and you won't see this in simulation mode for WES. But it's something we do with the case review that's unique to FSI. So once the FSI data is created we can launch FSI by we're gonna right click on the small storm down here. And we're gonna hold down the right mouse click button and we're gonna go to start FSI. And we're gonna select kcri is the data that we're going to want to look at. 

Now once we load FSI, it's gonna come up centered on the place we just right clicked. And one of the first things I'd like you to do is to hit the "i" button On the keyboard and that's going to toggle on and off interpolation. To be able to understand the sampling limitations of the radar as well as be able to piece together what FSI is doing at times it'll be helpful to toggle the interpolation off like right now, so we can see what the PPI is doing. So the plan position indicator or the tilt display is in the upper left and we're gonna look up here, and that's going to be the tilts when we navigate up on the keypad. Down here on the lower right there also is a PPI display in the 3d flyer window and The actual tilt is going to be labeled on the lower right in the FSI display. So we're at 0.5 degrees, 23:38 and 38 seconds. Now I'm gonna click on the 8 key on the keypad which has an up arrow on it. And in order for this to work num lock has to be ON on your keypad. I'm gonna see that my PPI just shifted to 0.9 degrees. I'm gonna hit it again. I'm gonna go up, and we see then I'm gonna tilt up to 1.5. Then I'm gonna hit it again and I'm gonna realize that it doesn't go anywhere. It stops in the lowest three tilts. If I look here in the upper right, the highest tilt and most recent tilt available is 1.5 degrees. So we're reviewing data right when the radar has reached that level. 
So it's kind of interesting that the keyboard navigation stops even though the cross section down here shows there's some tilts down here and tilts aloft. What it's actually doing on this most recent volume scan is it uses the tilts, the upper tilts from the previous volume scan and it blends it with the newer tilts from the newer volume scan to give what's called a virtual volume. So this virtual volume has this discontinuity where this third tilt has collected data, and it's blending it with the previous data. So you can navigate the virtual volume by using the 9 and 3 keys on the keypad. So if we do that we're at 1.5. I'm gonna hit the 9 key on the keypad in the upper right part of that the keyboard and it goes to 1.8 degrees at 23:35. Now I'm gonna go the 3 key to go down and it's 23:39 is 1.5. And then 23:35 at 1.8. So it goes backwards in time at the older tilt. So you can navigate the virtual volume on the current volume scan if you'd like. If you want to blend the old tilts from the previous volume scan with the new tilt on the current volume scan. Now that can get kind of confusing so a lot of people, they just want to go to the most complete volume scan available. So we're going to step backward with the 4 key on the keypad. When we do that, I want you to notice the cross-section display here on the lower left. And as we do that, I'm going to hit the 6 key to go forward. We're gonna see that again these three tilts are updating the upper tilts are not. And that goes along with that virtual volume scan concept. 

So here we are at 23:33 and 11 seconds. And we have a complete volume scan with no discontinuities. And we're going to be able to look at a full volume scan of reflectivity data. And we're gonna navigate through all tilts using the 8 key on the keypad in the upper right. We're going to go up. There 0.5, 0.9. We can look on the lower right of the tilt number here. And so we can tilt up with the PPI display in the upper left. And we also see it updating in the lower right on the 3d flyer window. So FSI allows us to use the 8 key on the keypad and the 2 key on the keypad to go up and down in a volume scan. And it links the cross-section displays with the PPI displays. Okay, so we have a PPI display in the upper right that we've been looking at. 

Another neat thing about FSI is we're gonna go to this upper right panel. And this is the CAPPI, the constant altitude planned position indicator display. And if we zoom out by scrolling out with the mouse just like in CAVE, we can see that this is a constant height. And this says it's, if we go up to 10,000 feet, it's going to blend all the radar data together to give us a horizontal cross-section at a constant height. Now when we want to look at the PPI, a lot of times we do want to turn back Interpolation. So I'm going to hit the 'i' key to turn that back on so I can have filled in data. But if I want to compare storms, which look different at different ranges because of where the tilts are intercepting the storm, this really normalizes the perspective of storms. And I can go up into mid-levels. And if I knew my height of my - 20 Celsius level, I could set my CAPPI there and I could really compare storm A to storm B. We see these storms in central Oklahoma are just monsters in size and in magnitude of reflectivity compared to the small one down in in southwest Oklahoma. So the all tilts, the all tilts kind of CAPPI display in the upper right allows us to scroll through the constant altitude cross-sections and be able to compare storm across at different ranges. 

Okay, so we have zoomed out and looked at that. But again, let's go ahead and left-click on our storm down here. And we're gonna drag this display. Left click and drag and then we're going to use the scroll wheel to zoom in on this storm. I'm going to go back to reviewing the characteristics of this storm. So we have our cross-section tool on the PPI display up here. And if we left click on the circle, we can move this around and sweep it through the storm and look for the elevated reflectivity core in the vertical cross section. Whenever we see areas of Echo overhang where we have a vertical reflectivity gradient, a lot of times those are weak echo regions and can tell us things about where updraft might be. So I'm gonna cut this cross section through this storm. I can set my constant altitude, my CAPPI up to the upper levels to see where that storm top is and I can make sure and intercept that storm top and the high reflectivity core. Now most of the times you don't need to stretch this CAPPI, but if you did, you could scroll the blue bar if you needed to. But I think we've got a pretty good perspective on that. 

So now one of the unique things we can do, just like we had keyboard shortcuts with the 1 through 8 keys in the, in the panel combo rotate, we have those four FSI as well. So we can hit the 1 key for reflectivity, 2 for SRM and or that's base velocity I should say. You can read it down here. 3 is SRM and there's our 270 degrees 19 knot storm motion that it inherits from that distance speed tool the first time it's launched. If you want to change your storm motion for FSI you need to set it in CAVE with the distance speed tool and then relaunch FSI. With the 3 key we are going to go from SRM, and we'll hit the 4 key to go to spectrum width. 5 key to go to the zdr. 6 key to go to correlation coefficient. 7 key to go to kdp and then the 8 key to go to the hydrometeor classification. So let's go ahead and click on the 1 key to go to reflectivity and then let's click, there's our high reflectivity kind of a hail core signature in mid to upper levels. Let's hit the 5 key on the keyboard to see what the zdr values would look like and the 6 key for correlation coefficient. And there is we're gonna go 1,6 to go between the reflectivity and the correlations. So when we want to do sampling we can click on the hourglass up here and read off these values, 0.8. I'm gonna go hit the 1 key again. So we've got high reflectivities and very low correlation coefficients. So this is the, you know, the smoking gun of a good hail core that's up in mid levels of the storm. 

One of the other things that we need to remember whenever we're using FSI, there's a preferences section for the cursor readout. Most of the displays you really don't need to change. But if you go down in the advanced setting and the openGL, there's a "use triangles over textures." Now I'm gonna go ahead and select that on. Yours could be off. But whenever you want to read out values you need to have this selected. Otherwise your cursor sampling could be off a few gates from where your actual mouse pointer is and it could give you a misleading value. So it takes more resources to do it, but it's well worth it to make sure when you're sampling out data values to make sure you're sampling out what you, where you think that is on the screen. So again we go to 1 and 6. You can see these values in here and the other thing with, if we hit the 8 key to go to the hydrometeor classification, we see that these values are actually stored as integers. And so it actually interpolates between the numbers, so you don't get to see the categories and some of the cross-section displays on the lower left. But you can kind of get the basic signal of where the hail core is according to the hydroclass. And it matches the observations of reflectivity and the 6 key with correlation coefficient quite well. 

So that brings us to our last tour of FSI and that's going to be the 3d flyer window in the lower right. And if we want to move the cross-section from there, I'm going to turn my sampling off. I can left-click on the circle on the cross-section bar and I can also move that through here. So that's another way of blending horizontal and vertical cross sections together in FSI. Now if I hold the shift key down, So if I hold the left mouse button down and move it I can pan. If I hold the shift key down first and then I, then I left click and go up and down, it's going to tilt the display. If I go left and right it's gonna rotate it if I hold that shift key down. So it takes a little while to get used to but hold down your shift key and then left mouse hold and push up and down to tilt and left and right to tilt left and right. So once you get the hang of it you can rotate your cross-sections, look at them from a lot of different angles. It's more sophisticated work to use the 3d flyer. But at least the real easy benefit is to use these vertical cross-sections to be able to see very sharp transitions. Like I'm gonna click on the 5 key to look at zdr and you can see the melting level really well in the vertical cross sections. So that can help tell you where the freezing level is and on convective and winter weather situations. And then you could also see unique things with the hail cores and just the 2d structure that's going to inherent in severe convective weather. 

So that's a full tour of FSI. Remember the most recent tilt is the virtual volume scan. You can go backwards 1, 2 to navigate a full volume that's free of any discontinuities. Use the readouts on the lower right to tell which tilt you're on. If you're going to use sampling make sure and turn on the triangles option. And make sure when you're sampling these gates, especially with velocity data, that you're reading out the exact value where your mouse cursor is. And then you can use a lot of the keyboard shortcuts to toggle between multiple base data and dual pol variables. And if you ever want to know a little bit more about some of the keyboard shortcuts, you can use z for reflectivity instead of 1. And a number of the other commands in here that are a little bit more sophisticated commands. But this is enough to get you started for RAC. And we'll have you using this a little bit just to be able to look at some of these cross section structures that that can give you a different perspective on radar base data analysis.