GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) showed a narrow (2-4 miles in width) plume of smoke+fog — the smoke was from a marsh fire burning near New Orleans East — that was moving to the northwest across Lake Pontchartrain after sunrise on 07 November 2023. This dense smoke+fog plume rapidly reduced... Read More

A Super Fog event — caused by the combination of dense fog and smoke from a large swamp fire just southeast of Lake Pontchartrain — was responsible for multi-vehicle accidents along Interstate 55 (between Lake Maurepas and Lake Pontchartrain) during the early morning hours on 23 October 2023 (meda report). Before a patch of... Read More

A sequence of GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB and Day Snow-Fog RGB images (above) showed widespread fog/stratus across parts of Montana, North/South Dakota and Minnesota during the day on 06 January 2023. With a quasi-stationary area of high pressure located over that area (surface analyses), winds remained light and the fog/stratus layer was slow... Read More

GOES-18 became the operational GOES-West satellite at 1800 UTC on 4 January. The toggle above shows the GOES-West (labeled as GOES-17, but the 1806 UTC image is using GOES-18 satellite information) IFR Probability Fields before/after the changeover. The IFR Probability field gives more useful information about surface visibility/ceiling restrictions than (for example) visible imagery (shown here) that shows widespread cloudiness at the... Read More