There were three items of interest to discuss that exhibited interesting satellite signatures on 13 July 2010. The first feature was a middle-tropospheric vortex that was spinning off the coast of California, as seen on AWIPS images of 8-km resolution GOES-11 6.7... Read More

Strong northwesterly winds behind a cold front gusted as high as 55 mph at Magee Peak in Washington State on 12 July 2010, causing some traffic accidents and road closures due to low visibility from blowing dust — and the blowing dust ended up restricting surface visibility to 2 miles as far to the east as... Read More

GOES-11 0.65 µm visible channel imagery (above) indicated that you would have been hard pressed to find a location along the entire West Coast of the US (from California to Washington State) that did not have fog or stratus clouds overhead during the morning hours on Read More

Under normal atmospheric conditions, the weighting function of most water vapor channels tends to peak at altitudes within the 500-300 hPa pressure range, allowing features within the middle to upper troposphere to be viewed on the water vapor imagery. However, under special conditions — for example, either a very dry or... Read More