GOES-16 (GOES-East) True Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images created using Geo2Grid (above) revealed the hazy signature of dense smoke aloft moving eastward across much of the Upper Midwest on 24 August 2020 — smoke that had been transported from large wildfires burning in California.Images of 532 nm and 1064 nm lidar attenuated backscatter... Read More

Tropical Storm Laura’s path near/over the Greater Antilles has affected her strength, and the relative lack of organization means that night-time satellite identification of the center is a challenge. Consider the animation above. Northerly shear (analysis from this site) has shifted the coldest cloud tops to the south of the circulation center... Read More

Tropical system Marco (formerly a category 1 Hurricane) was weakened by shear overnight and early morning on 24 August (as forecast).  The half-hourly animation above, of GOES-16 Band 10, i.e., infrared “low-level” water vapor (7.3 µm), overlain with derived motion winds at upper (red) and lower (blue) levels (Click here to see... Read More

1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-17 (GOES-West) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) images (above) showed the formation of a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) cloud that was spawned by the Castle Fire in California on 23 August 2020.The coldest pyroCb cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures were around -50ºC –according to 00 UTC rawinsonde data from Las Vegas, Nevada (below)... Read More