RADARSAT-2 passed over Samoan waters again on 9 February 2023, just after sunset (above) and near sunrise (at bottom). The imagery above compares the SAR winds to GOES-18 visible (with a changed enhancement to account for low light conditions, with reflectance values ranging from 0 to 6.3 only vs. the... Read More
1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-18 (GOES-West) “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (above) showed the colder cloud tops (shades of green) associated with snow squalls that moved east-southeastward across parts of far southern Wyoming and northern/central Colorado late in the day on 08 February 2023. Plots of 15-minute METAR surface reports indicated how... Read More
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) RADARSAT-2 observations continue in/around the South Pacific Ocean surrounding American Samoa. On 6 February, observations occurred at 0543 and 1640 UTC. The toggle below compares the 0540 UTC Band 13 Clean Window infrared (10.3 µm) image with overlain SAR winds (color-enhanced with the AWIPS ‘gridded data’... Read More
As noted previously, NOAA/STAR has arranged for special Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) wind observations over American Samoa during the month of February. Sentinel-1A SAR also provides occasional observations in and around the Samoan islands. The toggle above compares (using imagery from this website) derived wind speed and Normalized Radar Cross Section (NRCS) at 0600 UTC on 5... Read More
