After an outage of about a week brought on by an anomaly in NOAA-20 (since fixed), NUCAPS profiles have re-appeared in AWIPS workstations, starting with the 1713 UTC overpass over the Eastern United States, shown above. One use for NUCAPS is to gauge how well a forecast is evolving. For example, consider the point near New York City, highlighted by the circle in the image above. The 1200 UTC sounding from OKX (Upton, NY) is shown below.

GFS forecasts for the profile show a considerable change between 1200 and 1800 UTC valid times (i.e., 00h and 06h) as shown above; in particular strong drying aloft is indicated. NUCAPS profiles can help a forecaster understand if the model evolution is occurring in reality. The NUCAPS profile below, from the point circled in black at top (the profile to the right in the figure below), does show significant drying aloft by 1800 UTC that compares favorably aloft with the forecast profile (left). There are discrepancies closer to the boundary layer.

Welcome back NUCAPS profiles — and gridded NUCAPS fields!

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