This website works best with a newer web browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Microsoft Edge. Internet Explorer is not supported by this website.

CIMSS Satellite Blog

MENU

30-second images of severe thunderstorms along the Gulf Coast of Florida

By Scott Bachmeier •

GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm, top) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm, bottom) images, with time-matched SPC Storm Reports plotted in red/cyan [click to play animated GIF | MP4]

Overlapping 1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sectors provided GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images at 30-second intervals (above), which included plots of time-matched (+/- 3 minutes) SPC Storm Reports — showing thunderstorms that produced a few tornadoes, hail as large as 1.75 inches in diameter and wind gusts to 76 mph across parts of the Florida Panhandle (and adjacent far southwestern Georgia) on 27 April 2023. Pulsing overshooting tops exhibited infrared brightness temperatures as cold as -82ºC (violet pixels).

The coldest overshooting tops were associated with experimental CLAVR-x Cloud Top Height of 16.64 km (54593 ft), vs. 47866 ft (14.59 km) with the Operational CONUS sector Cloud Top Height product (below). The CLAVR-x derived GOES cloud products produced at CIMSS are at full 2 km spatial resolution — in contrast to some of the Operational cloud products, including Cloud Top Height, which are still disseminated at reduced resolutions of 10 km over the CONUS sector (although the Cloud Top Height spatial resolution is 4 km for the Mesoscale Domain Sector).

GOES-16 CLAVR-x vs Operational CONUS sector Cloud Top Height (top) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm, bottom) images at 1941 UTC [click to enlarge]

Categories: CLAVR-x, GOES-16, Severe convection