A vigorous extra-tropical cyclone moving towards the western Great Lakes on 11 November 2021 generated significant winds and waves over Lake Superior. RADARSAT winds, above, from RCM1, (available at this website) show a large area of southeasterly winds between 30 and 40 knots at 1159 UTC on 11 November. Regions of... Read More

Severe thunderstorms developed over northeast Illinois late in the afternoon on 9 August, and a series of tornadoes resulted. Storm Reports (from the Storm Prediction Center) are shown below. The mp4 animation above (click here for a large animated gif) shows 1-minute GOES-16 Mesoscale Sector 2 visible imagery (0.64 µm) from... Read More

Tropical Storm Mirinae, shown above, to the east of Japan (click here to see the same image with latitude/longitude lines), was overflown on 8 August by Radar Constellation Mission Satellite one (RCM-1) at 2013 UTC. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery (from this site) is shown below, with both polarities. The two... Read More

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) winds are derived from a microwave signal pinged from a satellite; backscatter is converted into winds (given a background field that is typically from a numerical model). The wind structure here is suggestive of a bowing feature to a convective downdraft. How does it compare to... Read More