Intense tropopause-penetrating updrafts and gravity wave breaking generate cirrus plumes that reside above the primary anvil. These “above anvil cirrus plumes” (AACPs) exhibit unique temperature and reflectance patterns in satellite imagery, best recognized within 1-min “super rapid scan” observations. AACPs are often evident during severe weather outbreaks and, due to their importance, have been studied for 35+ years. Despite this research, there is uncertainty regarding why some storms produce AACPs but other nearby storms do not, exactly how severe are storms with AACPs, and how AACP identification can assist with severe weather warning. These uncertainties are addressed through analysis of severe weather reports, NOAA/National Weather Service (NWS) severe weather warnings, metrics of updraft cloud height, intensity, and rotation derived from Doppler radars, as well as ground-based total lightning observations for 4583 storms observed by GOES super rapid scanning, 405 of which produced an AACP. Datasets are accumulated throughout storm lifetimes through radar object tracking. It is found that 1) AACP storms generated 14 times the number of reports per storm compared to non-AACP storms; 2) AACPs appeared, on average, 31 min in advance of severe weather; 3) 73% of significant severe weather reports were produced by AACP storms; 4) AACP recognition can provide comparable warning lead time to that provided by a forecaster; and 5) the presence of an AACP can increase forecaster confidence that large hail will occur. Given that AACPs occur throughout the world, and most of the world is not observed by Doppler radar, AACP-based severe storm identification and warning would be extremely helpful for protecting lives and property.

Observational and model resolution limitations currently preclude analysis of the smallest scales important to numerical prediction of convective storms. These missing scales can be recovered if the forecast model is integrated on a sufficiently fine grid, but not before errors are introduced that subsequently grow in scale and magnitude. This study is the first to systematically evaluate the impact of these initial-condition (IC) resolution errors on high-resolution forecasts of organized convection. This is done by comparing high-resolution supercell simulations generated using identical model settings but successively coarsened ICs. Consistent with the Warn-on-Forecast paradigm, the simulations are initialized with ongoing storms and integrated for 2 h. Both idealized and full-physics experiments are performed in order to examine how more realistic model settings modulate the error evolution. In all experiments, scales removed from the IC (wavelengths < 2, 4, 8, or 16 km) regenerate within 10–20 min of model integration. While the forecast errors arising from the initial absence of these scales become quantitatively large in many instances, the qualitative storm evolution is relatively insensitive to the IC resolution. It therefore appears that adopting much finer forecast (e.g., 250 m) than analysis (e.g., 3 km) grids for data assimilation and prediction would improve supercell forecasts given limited computational resources. This motivates continued development of mixed-resolution systems. The relative insensitivity to IC resolution further suggests that convective forecasting can be more readily advanced by improving model physics and numerics and expanding extrastorm observational coverage than by increasing intrastorm observational density.

Severe hail days account for the vast majority of severe weather-induced property losses in the United States each year. In the United States, real-time detection of severe storms is largely conducted using ground-based radar observations, mostly using the operational Next Generation Weather Radar network (NEXRAD), which provides three-dimensional information on the physics and dynamics of storms at ;5-min time intervals. Recent NEXRAD upgrades to higher resolution and to dual-polarization capabilities have provided improved hydrometeor discrimination in real time. New geostationary satellite platforms have also led to significant changes in observing capabilities over the United States beginning in 2016, with spatiotemporal resolution that is comparable to that of NEXRAD. Given these recent improvements, a thorough assessment of their ability to identify hailstorms and hail occurrence and to discriminate between hail sizes is needed. This study provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of existing observational radar and satellite products from more than 10 000 storms objectively identified via radar echo-top tracking and nearly 6000 hail reports during 30 recent severe weather days (2013-present). It is found that radar observations provide the most skillful discrimination between severe and nonsevere hailstorms and identification of individual hail occurrence. Single-polarization and dual-polarization radar observations perform similarly at these tasks, with the greatest skill found from combining both single-and dual-polarization metrics. In addition, revisions to the ''maximum expected size of hail'' (MESH) metric are proposed and are shown to improve spatiotemporal comparisons between reported hail sizes and radar-based estimates for the cases studied.