Our recent fascination with the MODIS Sea Surface Temperature (SST) product continues, with AWIPS imagery of the MODIS SST that revealed an intricate pattern of cold water eddies across the southern portion of Hudson Bay in Canada on 30 July 2007 (above; upper left panel). The 2 MODIS image sets are about 90... Read More

The low-lying areas of the Wisconsin River and other tributaries that drain into the upper Mississippi River are favored areas for nocturnal valley fog formation, as shown by the MODIS “fog/stratus product” and topography image comparison (above).AWIPS images of the MODIS and GOES-12 fog/stratus product from 29 July 2007 (below) demonstrated important differences... Read More

An mesoscale phenomenon that sometimes emerges out of Mesoscale Convective Systems (MCS) is the Mesoscale Convective Vortex (MCV). Intense latent heating within the rain core of an MCS can help spin up a vortex that will occasionally live on even as the MCS that spawned it withers away. The spin-up can be visualized as a potential... Read More

An AWIPS image of the MODIS Sea Surface Temperature (SST) product (above) revealed a pocket of warmer SST values (72-75ºF or 22-24ºC, orange enhancement) over the mid-lake waters of southern Lake Michigan during the afternoon (around 19:41 UTC, or 2:41 PM local time) on Read More