Hot and dry Santa Ana conditions across southern California (with wind gusts as high as 91 mph in Los Angeles county and 87 mph in Ventura county) caused widespread blowing dust/sand (reducing surface visibility to 3 miles at Ontario, station identifier KONT) and created an environment that allowed several large... Read More
The National Hurricane Center began issuing advisories on Tropical Depression 15 (located in the central Atlantic, east of Bermuda) on 11 October 2007. A GOES-12 visible image with ASCAT wind data sourced from the CIMSS Tropical Cyclones website (above) suggested that maximum winds were only around 30 knots.There was strong southwesterly flow aloft over the developing... Read More
“Lee waves” are sometimes seen just downwind of significant topography (such as high mountain ranges) when strong winds are perpendicular to the ridge lines — but even relatively subtle terrain features can produce lee wave clouds that are evident on satellite imagery (one such example of lee wave clouds in... Read More
Clearing skies in the wake of a cold frontal passage on 08 October 2007 allowed AWIPS 4-panel images of the MODIS visible, snow/ice, 3.7µm, and 11.0µm IR window channels (above) to reveal extensive swaths of slightly darker (and slightly cooler) wet ground which were oriented southwest-to-northeast across parts of Texas,... Read More
