A multi-week “parade of storms” over the Pacific Ocean featuring a persistent atmospheric river pattern and numerous winter storms pounding the U.S. west coast has resulted in record snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas with water equivalency at 205% of normal for mid-January in the northern Sierras, 255% central, and... Read More
This post features 2022 highlights from a polar-orbiting perspective, with a focus on U.S. scenes, most acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) flying on the Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. Also in 2022: NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) launched the JPSS-2 satellite, renamed NOAA-21. First light imagery... Read More
On 28 April, SPC’s convective outlook showed a small region of SLGT RSK over western Nebraska, with Marginal probabilities over most of Nebraska and Kansas (link to 2000 UTC outlook). The animation above shows hourly CAPE predictions from a 3-km version of the Rapid Refresh that is run hourly and initialized with Polar Hyperspectral... Read More
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
