Hurricane Cristobal and the Saharan Air Layer
Meteosat-10 Saharan Air Layer product (click to play animation)
The CIMSS Saharan Air Layer (SAL) product (above; click image to play animation) showed a large pocket of SAL (yellow to red color enhancement) drifting westward over the far western Atlantic Ocean and toward the Gulf of Mexico on 28 August 2014.
On GOES-13 0.63 µm visible channel images (below; click image to play animation), the hazy signature of the SAL dust could be seen surging westward, not far to the south of Category 1 intensity Hurricane Cristobal.
GOES-13 0.63 µm visible channel images (click to play animation)
The SAL also exhibited a warm/dry signature (yellow to orange color enhancement) on the corresponding GOES-13 6.5 µm water vapor channel images (below; click image to play animation).
GOES-13 6.5 µm water vapor channel images (click to play animation)
At 17:16 UTC, a Suomi NPP VIIRS true-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) image from the SSEC RealEarth web map server (below) showed that Hurricane Cristobal had developed an eye formation.
Suomi NPP VIIRS true-color image
A comparison of AWIPS-2 images of Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.64 µm visible channel and 11.45 µm IR channel data (below) revealed that the coldest cloud-top IR brightness temperatures (-77º C, lighter gray color enhancement) were located within convection just southwest and southeast of the eye.
Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.64 µm visible image and 11.45 µm IR channel image