We're dealing with stratiform moderate to heavy rain this evening, so I wanted to discuss the topic of adding modifiers to elements beyond what the current PoWT/FB GUI has available. In this case I wanted to increase my RW to + for a broad area, and I wanted to try to do it without "cheating" using the Pickup tool or other tools. Here are two methods I used:
- Last night when this rain was still 24 hours out, I was using the standard 6-hour QPF time range. However, I knew locally higher amounts were likely for a broad area and wanted to put in wider RW+ mention beyond what the PoWT MergeWx procedure usually does. So, to "force" it, I published my grids to official, then did a query on QPF to set areas greater than a half inch to 3" of QPF. Then I ran the MergeWx process to get my updated wx grids, then reverted QPF to official. This works fine for one issuance, but obviously if I re-run MergeWx, then I'll lose the broader RW+ wording.
- In the near-term tonight I'm more confident in timing, so I created 3-hour QPF grids. I've done this in the winter with as small as 1-hour QPF blocks to better depict snow/ice/liquid precip amounts and intensity (eg. light rain transitioning to heavy snow), and a few of my colleagues have borrowed this technique. This works well, is easier to update, but does have minor collaboration challenges - I end up using the StormTotal grid to make sure the 6-hour blocks are still well collaborated.
Anyone else use other techniques?
