The Sweat Farm Road / Big Turnaround fire complex (that started on 16 April 2007) has become the largest wildfire in Georgia history, burning over 472,000 acres so far. A series of daily (21:45 UTC) GOES-12 visible images (above) shows that the smoke plume drifted in different directions on various days due to shifting winds. A similar series of daily (21:45 UTC) GOES-12 3.9µm IR images (below) indicated that this was also a very hot fire (darker pixels = hotter brightness temperatures) — on many days the IR images revealed a saturation of the GOES-12 shortwave IR detectors (causing the temperature of the fire pixels to “roll-over” and be displayed as “cold” white pixels). The fire appeared to diminish somewhat on 27 April (note the smaller smoke plume and less intense fire hot spot on that day), but then it intensified the following day (and another new fire started just to the northwest).

A 3-channel red/green/blue (RGB) composite image using the Terra MODIS channels 07, 02, and 01 (below) shows the large size of the resulting burn scar that covered a significant portion of the southern half of Ware county Georgia on 30 April. The active fires that were still burning on that day were evident by the red-colored “hot spots” along the southeastern edge of the burn scar — the leading edge of the active fires had moved southward into extreme northern Charlton county. The new fire that started just to the northwest (in Atkinson county) a day earlier was also exhibiting a pronounced hot spot and smoke plume.

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According to news reports, algae blooms off the coast of California have been producing toxic levels of domoic acid that have recently killed large numbers of birds, sea lions, and dolphins. MODIS true color images centered over San Francisco, California (above; Java animation) show the presence of chlorophyll-containing phytoplankton (light blue-green color) along the immediate coastal waters during the 23 March to 24 April 2007 period.

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Severe convection developed ahead of a frontal boundary that was moving southward across the Rio Grande Valley late in the day on 24 April 2007. GOES-12 was in Rapid Scan Operations, providing images at 5-minute intervals during much of the event; 10.7 µm Infrared (IR) images (above; Java animation) showed that these supercells began to exhibit an “enhanced-v” signature about 30 minutes prior to the initial SPC storm reports (although the storm could very well have been producing severe weather before the time of the SPC reports, while it was still over Mexico). This storm produced large hail (up to 2.75 inches in diameter), strong winds (up to 76 mph), and the EF-3 tornado that killed 10 and injured 120 persons in the Eagle Pass, Texas / Piedras Negras, Mexico area.

A view of the storm with the 1-km resolution IR image from the polar orbiting NOAA-16 satellite revealed a “warm trench” signature surrounding the most intense overshooting top (above). You can get a sense that such a trench feature can surround an overshooting top by examining astronaut photography of thunderstorms taken from the space shuttle (image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center). The anvil top temperatures were as cold as -67º C on the GOES-12 IR image, which corresponded to the tropopause temperature near the 141 mb pressure level (at an altitude of 14.3 km / 47,000 ft) on the Del Rio, Texas rawinsonde report — however, the overshooting top temperatures were significantly colder (-78º C) on the NOAA-16 IR image. In addition, a false-color RGB composite using NOAA-16 AVHRR visible channels 1 and 2 along with IR channel 4 (below) showed a well-defined above-anvil cirrus plume streaming northeastward from the primary overshooting top region; this anvil plume was also a persistent feature on GOES-12 visible images (animated GIF | MP4).

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An intense upper-tropospheric cutoff low was moving across the southern Rocky Mountain region on 24 April 2007, which was very evident on GOES-12 water vapor imagery (QuickTime animation). An AWIPS image of the 17 UTC operational “GOES high density winds” overlaid on a 17:10 UTC water vapor image (above) did not adequately resolve the closed circulation; in contrast, the CIMSS “GOES mesoscale winds” (or “Atmospheric Motion Vectors”) generated at 16:15 UTC (below) did show the closed circulation of the upper low over eastern Colorado. These mesoscale winds are part of a suite of products available on the Satellite-based Nowcasting and Aviation Application Program (SNAAP) site.

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