  A suite of products has been developed and evaluated to assess hazards
presented by convective downbursts to aircraft in flight derived from the
current generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)
(11-12). The existing suite of GOES microburst products employs the GOES
sounder to calculate risk based on conceptual models of favorable environmental
profiles for convective downburst generation. A GOES sounder-derived wet
microburst severity index (WMSI) product to assess the potential magnitude of
convective downbursts, incorporating convective available potential energy
(CAPE) as well as the vertical theta-e difference (TeD) between the surface and
mid-troposphere has been developed and implemented. Intended to supplement the
use of the GOES WMSI product over the United States Great Plains region, a GOES
Hybrid Microburst Index (HMI) product has also evolved. The HMI product infers
the presence of a convective boundary layer by incorporating the sub-cloud
temperature lapse rate as well as the dew point depression difference between
the typical level of a convective cloud base and the sub-cloud layer. It is
proposed to merge the WMSI and HMI into a Microburst Windspeed Potential Index
(MWPI) algorithm for implementation in the GOES-R Advanced Baseline Imager
(ABI).
