GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (above) showed that Canadian wildfires burning along the Manitoba/Ontario border produced a pyroCumulonimbus (pyroCb) around 1930 UTC on 22 May 2018.As the pyroCb moved southeastward over western Ontario, the coldest GOES-16 cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures were... Read More
When cloud top temperatures are very cold, the 3.9 µm imagery will have characteristics that suggest a noisy signal. The 45-minute animation above shows a cold cloud top east of Florida in 4 different infrared channels: 3.9 µm (Upper Left), 10.3 µm (Upper Right), 8.5 µm (Lower Left) and 12.3 µm (Lower Right). That... Read More
Severe thunderstorms developed along and ahead of a cold front that was moving across the Northeastern US on 15 May 2018. 1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) showed the progression of these storms — and SPC storm reports (plotted in red, and parallax-corrected to align with the corresponding cloud-top feature) included an... Read More
Fires that developed over the plains of Saskatchewan, near Meadow Lake in west-central Saskatchewan, and near Prince Albert in central Saskatchewan, showed up well in Visible and Infrared imagery, shown above. A wind shift that occurred as the fires burned changed the direction of the smoke plume. Prince Albert had visibilities that dropped... Read More
