Strong winds gusting to 60-70 mph in the wake of a cold frontal passage on 24 February 2007 caused widespread blowing dust and wildfire activity across much of the Texas panhandle region. GOES-12 visible channel imagery (above; Java animation) showed the development of a large cloud of blowing dust, as well as several smaller smoke plumes to the south of the blowing dust feature. The dust cloud exhibited a pronounced reddish-brown hue on MODIS true color imagery, due to the composition of the soil in the source region near the Texas / New Mexico border. This airborne dust reduced surface visibilities to less than one mile at several locations, causing traffic accidents and even producing brown-colored snow and rain   (NWS Lubbock TX summary).

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GOES-12 3.9µm InfraRed (IR) imagery (below; Java animation) revealed several “hot spots” (black enhancement) due to wildfire activity that also flared up due to the strong winds. Note that one fire (near Killeen TX, station identifier KGRK, bottom center of the image) became hot enough to saturate the GOES-12 3.9µm detectors at 19:32 UTC, causing the brightness temperature to “wrap around” and actually show up as a “cold” pixel (white enhancement).

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On 18 February 2007 NOAA/NESDIS/OSO implemented a new schedule for GOES-10 sounder scans during house-keeping periods. The previous sounder schedule had spatial gaps between the hourly scan sectors (above), while the new sounder schedule allows for continuous north-to-south coverage of the entire South American continent (below), while making narrower scans. The GOES-10 satellite has been postioned at 60º W longitude to support the Earth Observation Partnership of the Americas (EOPA) project. The latest GOES-10 sounder and imager products are available on the CIMSS GOES Realtime Derived Products site.

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GOES-12 visible imagery (above; Java animation) revealed several large “ice floes” that were moving rapidly southwestward across southern Lake Michigan on 14 February 2007. Strong northeasterly winds associated with an intense winter storm in the northeastern US were likely breaking large pieces of “fast ice” from the Michigan shore and causing them to drift toward the southern end of Lake Michigan. A well-defined cloud band can also be seen to the west of the ice floes — this feature produced 1-3 inches of lake-effect snowfall as it moved inland across northeastern Illinois and northwestern Indiana. 250-meter resolution MODIS true color imagery (below; Java animation) shows these ice features with better clarity than the 1-km resolution GOES-12 imagery.

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The lake-effect snowfall (LES) across the eastern Great Lakes region during the early February 2007 arctic outbreak has been phenomenal: as of 12 February, storm total snowfall amounts downwind of Lake Ontario have been as high as 141 inches in Redfield, New York (accumulations of 27 inches in 12 hours were reported, along with snowfall rates of up to 4-5 inches per hour). A series of daily Terra and Aqua MODIS true color images during the 03-09 February period (Java animation) show the well-defined LES bands over Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; you can also see the areal extent of lake ice increasing during this time over Lake Erie (this lake is the most shallow of the five Great Lakes, so it tends to freeze the earliest).

GOES-12 visible imagery (below; Java animation) shows the movement of an intense LES band across Lake Ontario on 06 February 2007.

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