Ice storm across the Southern Plains and Mid-South

By Scott Bachmeier • 3 February 2023

GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and Day Snow-Fog RGB images [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

After a prolonged 3-day winter storm that produced highly disruptive accumulations of sleet and freezing rain (WPC Storm Summary) across parts of the Southern Plains and Mid-South from 31 January – 02 February 2023, clouds cleared out across much of those regions on 03 February — allowing GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and Day Snow-Fog RGB images (above) to depict some of the areas where significant ice accrual occurred.

The Day Snow-Fog RGB imagery is more useful here, because it leverages the 1.61 µm “Snow/Ice” spectral band. As seen in a plot of ABI Spectral Response Functions (below), snow and ice are efficient absorbers of radiation (and therefore exhibit a low reflectance) at the 1.61 µm wavelength — making those features appear as shades of red in the RGB images (and since ice absorbs even more strongly than snow, ice appears as the darkest shades of red).

Plots of Spectral Response Function for ABI Bands 1-5 (credit: Mat Gunshor, CIMSS) [click to enlarge]

Due to the translucent nature of thicker ice accrual (providing that it is not covered with a layer of light snow), note that some areas of significant ice accrual are not as apparent in the Visible imagery as they are in the RGB imagery — in particular, over parts of western Tennessee, far northwestern Mississippi and southern Arkansas (as shown in a GOES-16 image comparison at 1616 UTC and a NOAA-20 image comparison at 1831 UTC, below).

GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and Day Snow-Fog RGB images at 1616 UTC [click to enlarge]

NOAA-20 VIIRS Visible (0.64 µm) and Near-Infrared “Snow/Ice” (1.61 µm) images vaid at at 1831 UTC [click to enlarge]

Other blog posts documenting the identification of areas with significant ice accrual can be found here.

Categories: GOES-16, NOAA-20, Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images, VIIRS, Winter weather

CIMSS Satellite Blog

CIMSS Satellite Blog

Ice storm across the Southern Plains and Mid-South