A series of Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) images (ascending passes) from Metop-B, above, show a large region of gale force winds surrounding the Hawai’ian Islands between 3 April and 5 April 2024. The entire island chain is under Wind Advisories or Gale Warnings; additionally, High Surf Advisories are in effect on... Read More
Metop-C and NOAA-20 are now both supplying NUCAPS profiles to National Weather Service AWIPS machines. Both the vertical profiles and gridded fields are available. The toggle above shows all the MetopC overpasses early on 4 April, and it includes horizontal maps of 850-mb Temperatures derived from the Metop-C NUCAPS profiles. Large swaths of satellite-derived fields are available... Read More
The addition of a 2nd satellite (MetopC) producing NUCAPS profiles means that places such as Guam have twice as much Satellite information over the otherwise data-sparse western Pacific Ocean. The three-panel above shows the 1200 UTC sounding at Guam (on the left) with a nearly coincident 1208 UTC NUCAPS profile... Read More
The incorporation of MetopC NUCAPS files into AWIPS also means that MetopC Gridded NUCAPS fields are available for forecasters to help diagnose the state of the atmosphere. The toggle above shows two swaths of data, one from MetopC over China, and one from NOAA-20 over the western Pacific. The imagery also includes estimates of the 850-500 mb lapse rates in... Read More
