Several recent notices have announced that radiosonde-carrying balloon launches to measure the temperature and moisture (and winds) in the atmosphere are suspended due to personnel shortages. There are products available to mitigate this data shortage. NOAA-Unique Combined Atmospheric Processing System (NUCAPS) profiles (training video here) use data from CrIS/ATMS (on... Read More
This short tutorial will explain how Polar2Grid can show individual isobaric levels, and also lapse rates (dT/dp) between two isobaric levels. Polar2Grid is CSPP software designed to process files either from the NOAA NODD (EDR files for NOAA-20 are here; EDR files for NOAA-21 are here) or from Direct Broadcast antenna... Read More
The Night Microphysics RGB animation from the CSPP Geosphere site (direct link to animation) below shows clouds of various heights (and temperatures). For example deep high clouds (likely precipitating) stretch northwest to southeast to the north of the Samoan Island chain. Low clouds are indicated over the three main Samoan islands: Savai’i, Upolu and... Read More
NUCAPS estimates of temperature and dewpoint give swaths of information over the Arctic — a region where conventional observations are uncommon and widely spaced. The toggle above shows a disorganized low pressure system over central Alaska — light snow is widespread as shown by the surface observations, below (and in... Read More
