Direct Broadcast views of strong convection in the western Pacific Ocean
Himawari-9 clean window (Band 13, 10.4 µm) infrared imagery, below, (created using geo2grid software and HSD files from the SSEC Data Center) shows strong convection developing in the Philippine Sea between the Philippines to the southwest, the Ryuku Islands to the west, Japan to the north, and Guam far to the east. The structure of the the convection in the infrared imagery at the start of the animation strongly suggests development along an outflow boundary that persists through much of the animation.
The toggle below shows where the outflow might exist at 0800 UTC.
This area of the western Pacific Ocean falls under the view of the Direct Broadcast antenna in the back yard of the National Weather Service on the island of Guam. What does the information downloaded from that antenna show? Three derived rain-rates from MetopC, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 are shown below (imagery courtesy Douglas Schumacher, SSEC/CIMSS). The convection persisted for these five hours.
Day Night Band imagery from NOAA-21 shows that the strong convection was electrified. Lightning streaks are obvious in the Day Night band imagery.
Ground-based lightning observations, below (Courtesy Brandon Aydlett, Science/Operations Officer in Guam), also show extensive lightning with this convective system.
GCOM AMSR-2 imagery, below (also processed at the Direct Broadcast site on Guam, and ingested into the AWIPS machine, and also courtesy of Brandon Aydlett, WFO Guam), shows the strong microwave signal and the winds diagnosed to exceed 40 knots (and the region where wind diagnostics failed because of rain contamination). The wind speeds are also available at this NOAA/NESDIS site.
Himawari-9 Full Disk airmass RGB imagery (source) from late in the day on 10 April, below, shows that this convection was to the south of a developing cyclone moving into the northwest Pacific Ocean.
Thanks to Brandon Aydlett, WFO Guam, for kick-starting this blog post!