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Category: Lightning

Viewing Fall lightning with RealEarth

Cooler temperatures across the Midwest are often heralded by thunderstorms. Yesterday evening and last night, a system brought rain and lightning to parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan, moving over Ohio by Thursday morning. RealEarth, a web-based visualization platform developed at UW-Madison, can display data from GOES-16 to... Read More

Pyrocumulonimbus clouds with lightning produced by the Dixie Fire in California

5-minute GOES-17 (GOES-West) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm), “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) and Fire Temperature RGB images (above) revealed that the Dixie Fire in northern California produced a pair of pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds — denoted by cloud-top 10.35 µm infrared brightness temperatures of -40ºC or colder (shades of blue pixels) — late in the day on 19 July 2021.... Read More

Forecasting lightning

Lightning safety is important for aircraft, mariners, and many outdoor activities. CIMSS is working to evaluate a model that nowcasts lightning. This model was trained using GOES-16 ABI visible, near-infrared, and long-wave infrared channels, as well as GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) observations. It predicts the probability of lightning (IC... Read More