A GOES-17 airmass RGB, above, shows a strong feature in the Gulf of Alaska. It’s common to associate the orange and purple regions within that polar feature (that is accompanied by cloud features consistent with very cold air aloft) with enhanced ozone. What products are available online to gauge the... Read More
A benefit of Polar Orbiters over northernmost Alaska is a wealth of NUCAPS soundings from NOAA-20! The animation above shows useful profiles near Utqiagvik AK (formerly Barrow) for the nine hours between 1132 and 2128 UTC on 5 December 2021. The vibrant green point is the point selected for the... Read More
The highest peaks of the Big Island of Hawai’i are under Blizzard warnings as of early 3 December 2021, as shown in the screen capture below from the National Weather Service in Honolulu.The image above shows NUCAPS Sounding Availability in AWIPS over the central Pacific. A long swath of profiles was available from a... Read More
A useful strength of NUCAPS profiles over Alaska is that at that northern Latitude, sequential overpasses will overlap so that one location will be sampled sequential times. In the example above, note for example that portions of Canada’s Northwest Territories are sampled three times. Much of southern Alaska is sampled... Read More
