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CIMSS GOES Sounder Brightness Temperature Intercomparisons Help Page |
General Information:
This web page is designed to allow users to compare several different types of brightness temperatures related to the processing of CIMSS GOES Sounder single Field-of-View (FOV) physical retrievals (Li et al.(2008)) of temperature and moisture. These retrievals are produced hourly in near-realtime from the two operational NOAA geostationary satellites: GOES-East (GOES-13, 75W) and GOES-West (GOES-15, 135W). The retrieval domain from both satellites combined covers the Continental U.S. (CONUS), plus some adjacent coastal waters. Only data from those retrievals determined as being cloud-free are processed on this web page.
The web page contains 4 separate "panels" to use for plotting data. More than one graph can be plotted on a given panel. For example, you can plot both the channel 8 and channel 7 observed brightness temperatures on one panel. (In this case, you would probably want to select a different color and(or) symbol to use for the second plot.) To generate a specific plot, 4 basic steps are involved:
- Select a range of dates of data to plot. The plot will start at 00UTC on the first date, and will extend through 23UTC on the last date, unless the last date is the current day, in which case the end of the plot will be the current UTC hour.
- Select the parameter to plot. Note that you can select from 18 different GOES Sounder bands. Furthermore, you need to select the data to plot, which can be either differences between different brightness temperatures, or various observed/forward-calculated brightness temperatures. Then, for whatever data you decide to plot, you must specify the desired statistic. The default statistic to plot is average.
- Select any plot options.
- After selecting the panel to use for your plot (1 -> 4), click on the "Create Plot" button to generate the plot. Then if you wish to save a PNG file containing your plot, click on the "Save plot as PNG file" button and follow the instructions. Don't forget to delete the temporary image when you are finished saving the PNG file!
Page usage hints:
- Note the plot defaults (e.g., average GOES-East Sounder channel 8 observed brightness temperatures). If desired, you can click immediately on the "Create Plot" button after loading the page, and the corresponding plot will appear in Panel 1.
- When trying to generate a plot that you will save to a PNG file, it is probably best to refresh the web page first (Press and click on "Reload" in your browser simultaneously)!
See also:
- To see corresponding CIMSS near-realtime GOES Sounder single Field-of-View (FOV) physical retrieval products, please click here.
References:
Li, Z., J. Li, W. P. Menzel, T. J. Schmit, J. P. Nelson III, J. Daniels, and S. A. Ackerman (2008),
GOES sounding improvement and applications to severe storm nowcasting, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35,
L03806, doi:10.1029/2007GL032797.
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