Severe weather occurred over Kansas late in the day 13 March. SPC Storm Reports, shown below, indicate three tornadoes (as of 13 March) within a swath of wind and hail reports. The animation above shows the development of the strong thunderstorms along a warm front in northern Kansas. The tornado observations are plotted between 0046 and 0146 UTC on 14 March. They occurred within the Topeka KS CWA (WFO TOP) that is outlined in the animation above.

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Overlapping 1-minute GOES-16 Mesoscale Domain Sectors provided imagery at 30-second intervals over northcentral/northeast Kansas — Infrared imagery covering the period when the tornado-producing thunderstorms occurred within the WFO Topeka County Warning Area are shown above. The default max/min Infrared enhancement Color Table ranges were changed to 55/-90 C, to better highlight the pulses of overshooting tops. Beginning around 0040 UTC, a distinct “enhanced-V” storm top signature was exhibited by the thunderstorm that produced the first tornado, south-southeast of Ft. Riley Kansas (KFRI) at 0050 UTC.

A larger-scale view using 1-minute GOES-16 Infrared images is shown below. Note the report of 4.00-inch diameter hail at 0110 UTC, just southeast of Manhattan, Kansas (KMHK).

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What satellite products might have been used before this outbreak to better understand or anticipate it? The toggle below shows lapse rates (700-500mb and 850-700 mb) derived from gridded NOAA-20 NUCAPS profiles (source). Steep lapse rates exist over Kansas from 700-500 mb; convection that develops there will not be impeded by stability.

Polar Hyperspectral Soundings can be fused with ABI data to blend the high spectral resolution Polar Data with the high spatial and temporal resolution of geostationary data. That thermodynamic information can then be assimilated into a high-resolution mesoscale model to give short-term forecasts that include better moisture information. Model output is here (this model is one of the products to be demonstrated at the Hazardous Weather Testbed at the Storm Prediction Center in late May and early June). What did model output suggest. The animations below shows Significant Tornado Parameter at 0100 and 0200 UTC on 14 March (from two consecutive model runs initialized at 2000 UTC and 2200 UTC on 13 March 2024, respectively). Both model runs suggest greater tornado probabilities within the TOP CWA, as was observed.

Animations of MUCAPE, below, valid at 0000, 0100 and 0200 UTC on 14 March, show the northward motion to the most unstable air through the Topeka CWA

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10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images displayed using RealEarth (above) showed the development of a thunderstorm that produced giant hail in Campana, Argentina during the evening hours (local time) on 12 March 2024.  An overlay of GLM Group Points depicted a good deal of lightning activity associated with that particular storm. This thunderstorm activity occurred in advance of a cold front that was moving northward toward the area (surface analyses).

Note that the thunderstorm appeared to pass southeast of Campana — but a parallax correction of about 18 km to the northwest is necessary for a tall cloud top at that location, as shown at this site.

A probe of the coldest 10.3 µm infrared brightness temperature at 2330 UTC (above) showed -85.2ºC — which was several degrees colder than that of the tropopause (-80.7ºC) in 1200 UTC rawinsonde data at Santa Rosa (below).

Huge hail in Campana, Buenos Aires in Argentina –
VIDEO: https://t.co/zNk6WXNDK8
Granizo de gran tamaño cayó esta noche en #Campana #Diluvia #argentina #tormenta #granizo #campana #cardales #diluvio #lluvia (Marzo 12, 2024). #Huge #Hailstorm #Granizada pic.twitter.com/7Ec8zk9OVE

— Tetova News (@TetovaNews1) March 13, 2024

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Two weeks after the Smokehouse Creek Fire and Windy Deuce Fire started in the Texas Panhandle — as discussed in this blog post — a comparison of Suomi-NPP VIIRS True Color RGB and False Color RGB images along with the GOES-16 (GOES-East) Land Surface Temperature (LST) derived product (above) showed the extent of the burn scars from those 2 fires on 11 March 2024. LST values were 10-12ºF warmer in the core of the burn scars (upper 90s to 100ºF, darker shades of red) compared to areas immediately adjacent to the scars (upper 80s F to low 90s F, cyan to green). On that day the 2 fires were 89% and 94% contained, respectively.

A 30-meter resolution Landsat-8 Natural Color RGB image displayed using RealEarth (below) provided a more detailed view of the 2 burn scars.

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A line of dense convective clouds in the Pacific Ocean, south of Central America, produces lightning. The lightning is being picked up by the GOES Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). The storm system sits about 500 km north of the Galapagos Islands and extends eastward to the coast of Colombia.

GLM, which is the first ever instrument aboard a GOES satellite that specifically locates and tracks lightning, detects brightness given off by clouds that can be seen from a satellite’s perspective. GLM can detect lightning both during day and night. In the animation above, a GLM product called the group density is shown. The density of lightning is depicted by orange and yellow squares. Group density can be thought of as the number of lightning flashes per given area. As seen in the animation, lightning density is spaced out across the entire storm system, including areas of high convection and overshooting tops, which can be identified by the false color Band 13 infrared channel.

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