Hello,
1)
I was curious if
there was a way to actually view
the land-sea/water mask used for the northwest
and our area?
I'm interested in viewing the land-water distinction
that is used to better understand the RTMA/URMA
analyses for our area, I'm hoping it will help us
better understand the affect of land obs on water areas.
Some background: We often have three apparent areas
that stand out within a small region that I believe
may be tied to the land-water mask. The Wallula Gap
that extends north to the Tri-Cities (Kennewick,
Pasco, and Richland) that is labeled "a",
a section of the Columbia River by the Umatilla
National Wildlife Refuge labeled "b", and a single
pixel east of Hermiston on the Columbia River labeled "c."
To help show these areas, here are two examples. One
from GFE (image 1) and the other is from the
NBM/RTMA/URMA Prototype Viewer (image 2) with the
labels from above. They show up quite prominently of
course in the usual situations (when it is
unseasonably hot in the Summer as cold spots, transition
seasons, etc.).
That said, I think we are pretty pleased with the
first one, Wallula Gap on north or "a." It
appeared to be reasonable and more representative this
summer. For our own benefit, we did an exercise with a
Kestrel thermometer and took some measurements in this
very data sparse area and saw it was considerably
cooler in that area. That said, it may have been a
couple degrees still too cool (3-6 F). Nonetheless, the
cooler analysis with URMA appeared more representative
than what our coarse analysis with MatchObsAll would have.
Specifically for the lone cold-bias pixel east of
Hermiston, it appears that it sticks out between the
adjacent warm pixels.
Is this pixel being treated as water in the land-water
mask? That said, I know improvements are
anticipated with the HRRR v4 upgrade in early December
as it has a built-in inland lake model that will be
implemented. Would you
expect these areas to see improvement from this update?
2) I recently noticed new stations in this area when
looking at the KML station obs this Fall. The obs didn't
appear to be present over the summer from the
providers: Washington State University
Ag Met (WSAgMet) and WxFlow (see the stations circled
in image 3).
Do you all have any info on WxFlow by
chance? For example, one site from 'WxFlow'
was XKEL. However, I couldn't find this
provider's stations on the madis viewer (https://madis-data.ncep.noaa.gov/MadisSurface/).
Do you all know a way by chance to view them online somewhere?
