1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) GeoColor RGB images with an overlay of Next Generation Fire System fire detection polygons (above) displayed the thermal anomalies and dense smoke plumes associated with the Camp House Fire (near Brimson) and Jenkins Creek Fire (near Fairbanks) in northeastern Minnesota on 12 May 2025. These 2 wildfires prompted the issuance of a few evacuation orders.

Thick smoke drifted northeastward across the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and crossed the Canadian border — GOES-19 Aerosol Optical Depth values with these smoke plumes were as high as 1.0 (below).

A NGFS probe of the Jenkins Creek Fire at 2120 UTC on 12 May (below showed various parameters of the thermal anomaly at that time.

The Camp House Fire began on the previous day, and had continued burning through the subsequent nighttime hours — its nocturnal glow was evident in a NOAA-21 VIIRS Day/Night Band image at 0831 UTC (3:31 AM local time), just northeast of Brimson (below).

1-minute GOES-19 Visible images with an overlay of the Fire Detection and Characterization Algorithm (FDCA) Fire Mask derived product (below) also showed the thermal signatures and smoke plumes of the 2 larger wildfires (along with a 3rd, smaller wildfire that began to the southwest at 1953 UTC near Shaw). South-southwest winds were gusting to 20-25 knots (23-29 mph) across the region, contributing to the extreme fire behavior.

An overpass of Landsat-8 provided a 30-meter resolution image of the Jenkins Creek and Camp House wildfires at 1657 UTC (11:57 AM local time) on 12 May, as viewed using RealEarth (below). The active fires appeared as brighter shades of pink, with their hazy smoke plumes extending northward.

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It was another clear night over the Great Lakes on 12 May 2025 and NOAA-20 had a descending orbit over western lower Michigan around 0740 UTC that allowed a view of all five Great Lakes. CSPP software running at CIMSS produces both SDR (Sensor Data Record) and EDR (Environmental Data Record) files that can be then manipulated by polar2grid to create imagery. There are sites where imagery is routinely available. The image below, for example, shows NOAA-20 ACSPO SSTs from the CIMSS DBPS website, as discussed here, but that Madison-centered image does not include Lake Ontario, and the colorbar used is a little too warm for mid-May! (Note: RealEarth also used the data)

The direct broadcast website (https://ftp.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/eosdb/) does include an image of the entire Great Lakes produced by NOAA-20 data (at this ephemeral url). Again, the colorbar is a little too warm.

The data to create (using polar2grid) more customized imagery is available at the CIMSS ftp site mentioned above. ACSPO SSTs can be created using an EDR file (that is, the file 20250512073000-CSPP-L2P_GHRSST-SSTsubskin-VIIRS_N20-ACSPO_V2.80-v02.0-fv01.0.nc shown in this file list at https://ftp.ssec.wisc.edu/eosdb/j01/viirs/2025_05_12_132_0733/edr/. I then followed the directions in the polar2grid documentation here to produce a Lake Surface Temperature scaled from 273.15 K – 293.15 K. The commands I used are listed below. Note that ‘p2g_sst_palette.txt’ is pre-loaded within the polar2grid directories. The ‘rescale.yaml’ file is something I created following the documentation.

../p2g_grid_helper.sh greatlakes -83.5 45.1 750 -750 1800 1200 > GreatLakes.yaml
../polar2grid.sh -r acspo -w geotiff -p sst -g greatlakes --grid-configs ./GreatLakes.yaml --extra-config-path ./rescale.yaml -f /pathToVIIRS_SSTfile/20250512073000-CSPP-L2P_GHRSST-SSTsubskin-VIIRS_N20-ACSPO_V2.80-v02.0-fv01.0.nc
../add_colormap.sh ../../colormaps/p2g_sst_palette.txt noaa20_viirs_sst_20250512_073317_greatlakes.tif
../add_coastlines.sh --add-coastlines --coastlines-resolution f --add-colorbar --colorbar-height 42 --colorbar-text-size 24  --colorbar-min 0.0 --colorbar-max 20.0 noaa20_viirs_sst_20250512_073317_greatlakes.tif

The SST image created with the commands above has no value — is transparent — where there is no water. Let’s put the SSTs on top of Day Night Band imagery, and for that I needed SDR files that can be found at https://ftp.ssec.wisc.edu/eosdb/j01/viirs/2025_05_12_132_0733/sdr/ ; I downloaded all the SVDNB files (containing the data) and the GDNB0 files (containing georeferencing) to an otherwise empty directory, and created the the DNB imagery. Of the three varieties of Day Night Band imagery created (hncc, dynamic and adaptive), I decided for this day that adaptive looked the most acceptable.

../p2g_grid_helper.sh greatlakes -83.5 45.1 750 -750 1800 1200 > GreatLakes.yaml
../polar2grid.sh -r viirs_sdr -w geotiff -p hncc_dnb dynamic_dnb adaptive_dnb -g greatlakes --grid-configs ./GreatLakes.yaml -f /pathToFiles/DNB/*
../add_coastlines.sh --add-coastlines --coastlines-resolution f *dnb*.tif

I then used ImageMagick, shown below, to combine the two images.

convert -composite -gravity center noaa20_viirs_adaptive_dnb_20250512_073317_greatlakes.png noaa20_viirs_sst_20250512_073317_greatlakes.png NOAA20_VIIRS_DNB_ACSPO_SST_20250512_0733UTC.png

Western Lake Erie, as is typical, has the warmest waters — almost 60^o F! Saginaw and Green Bays also have relatively warm water. In contrast, Lake Superior and much of Lakes Huron and Ontario remain very cold — 40^o F or cooler.

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From the mailbag early on Friday 9 May 2025

The contrail show over the Lake MI region is pretty crazy this morning with the rotated flow aloft. Wondering if these are originating from a bunch of intercontinental flights that touch high latitudes in "great circle" fashion.

What did the mid-level water vapor imagery show? The 10-hour animation below from 0636 to 1631 UTC does indeed show multiple contrails, colder than their surroundings, rotating around an upper-level anticyclone over Iowa/Minnesota. (Click here for a view from the ground).

What other GOES-R bands/products allow one to view cirrus clouds? ABI’s Band 4 detects radiation at 1.38 µm, a radiation wavelength that is strongly absorbed by water vapor. Thus, in regions of water vapor, any reflective signal is strongly attenuated if there is water vapor above the reflective surface. Contrails high in the atmosphere typically are not overlain by much water vapor, so Band 4 will highlight these features during the daytime. The signal from any low-level cloud, however, is attenuated by water vapor in the atmosphere.

The Split Window Difference (SWD) fields, 10.3 µm – 12.3 µm, can also be used to detect the presence of cirrus clouds. Contrails show positive SWD values because of stronger absorption by water vapor of radiation with wavelengths of 12.3 µm than at 10.3 µm. The sub-pixel effect is also important. The satellite sensor at 12.3 µm is more sensitive to the colder part of the pixel in a partly cloudy scene that includes contrails that will not cover the entire satellite pixel. The 10.3 µm sensor will be a bit more sensitive to the warmer parts of the pixel than the 12.3 µm sensor. The difference field will therefore highlight contrails.

The Split Window Difference value shown above changes as the sun comes up and the boundary layer warms. Eventually, the gradient in Total Precipitable Water (TPW) that is evident in the animation below, also becomes apparent in the animation above. A strong inversion as was present on this day (here is the Quad Cities IA sounding, and here is the Chanhassen MN sounding). Once the inversion breaks, the SWD signal that describes moisture becomes more apparent. The hourly Land Surface Temperature estimates that might be used to detemined when the inversion is breaking are shown at the bottom.

This 2014 journal article by Lindsey et al. describes in more depth the evolution of SWD values as the boundary layer warms. Thanks to TJ Turnage, SOO in Grand Rapids, for the email!

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10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-19 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (above) showed that a wildfire in central Saskatchewan produced a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) cloud on 08 May 2025 (this was the first documented pyroCb of the 2025 North America wildfire season). The pyroCb exhibited cloud-top 10.3 µm infrared brightness temperatures (IRBTs) in the -40s C (denoted by shades of blue to cyan), a necessary condition to be classified as a pyroCb.

The coldest pyroCb cloud-top 10.3 µm IRBT was -47.7ºC — which was slightly colder than the air temperature of the Maximum Parcel Level (MPL) analyzed from rawinsonde data at The Pas, Manitoba (below).

GOES-19 Visible + Fire Mask and Infrared images (below) showed that the pyroCb developed as a cold front was passing through a small cluster of wildfires; surface air temperatures at nearby METAR sites were as warm as 86ºF, with wind gusts as high as 37 kts (43 mph).

A plot of surface observation data from Nipawin (station identifier CYBU) showed that after the cold frontal passage, smoke from the nearby pyroCb-producing wildfire reduced the surface visibility to 2-3miles at times (below).

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