5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) images of the Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) derived product (above) showed very high AOD values of 1.0-1.8 over the Gulf of Mexico on 14 May 2024 — associated with dense smoke from ongoing seasonal burning activity in parts of Mexico and Central America. This smoke had been moving northward and covering the entire western half of the Gulf of Mexico — and even parts of the Gulf Coast states — since the end of April. However, a cold front moving southward on 14 May was acting to push the northern edge of the smoke farther away from the Texas coast.

The sharp smoke vs. no-smoke boundary was also very apparent in GOES-16 True Color RGB images from the CSPP GeoSphere site (below).

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NUCAPS EDRs (Environmental Data Records) are now populating space in the cloud, such as at this Amazon webservices (AWS) link https://noaa-nesdis-n20-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html. This is part of the NODD (NOAA Open-Data Dessemination) project. At that AWS link you will see a ‘NUCAPS-EDR’ directory, and dropping down through year/month/day selections, a list of filenames appears with names such as: NUCAPS-EDR_v3r1_j01_s202405141514589_e202405141515287_c202405141606240.nc ; ‘j01’ identifies the satellite as NOAA-20; data in this file starts 15:14:58.9 on 14 May 2024, ends at 15:15:28.7 on 14 May 2024, and was created on 16:06:24.0 on 14 May 2024. The file listing shown below as a screen-capture shows data from 1725 to 1732 UTC on 14 May 2024.

These data can be displayed most easily by knowing when NOAA-20 overflew a region, and this website helps with that. The GOES-East projection showing NOAA-20 orbits on 14 May is shown below. Focus on the ascending pass off the East Coast of the United States, from 17:25 to 17:32 or so.

After downloading the Sounder QuickLooks software (from CSPP), 7 commands created the mapping of temperature shown up top. First, the .qz file that includes the software packages was expanded and I changed locations to the created directory, making that the home directory with the export command. A shell script within the directory is then sourced to set up environments (one result of this shell script is that the $CSPP_SOUNDER_QL_HOME/bin directory is added to a user’s $PATH). Then I changed to the bin directory. The script ‘getall’ retrieves the netcdf files from the cloud — it’s a series of unix wget commands, i.e., “wget https://noaa-nesdis-n20-pds.s3.amazonaws.com/NUCAPS-EDR/2024/05/14/NUCAPS-EDR_v3r1_j01_s202405141725389_e202405141726087_c202405141803060.nc". The variable ‘files’ matches all of the netcdf files that were downloaded. Finally, the 700-mb temperature field is created, as shown above. (Note: because the cspp_sounder_ql_env shell script puts the bin directory in the user’s $PATH, the ql_level2_image shell script below could be invoked from any directory. In other words, there’s no need to put the netcdf files in the bin directory!)

tar -xvf cspp-sounder-ql-1.3.tar.gz 
cd cspp-sounder-ql-1.3
export CSPP_SOUNDER_QL_HOME=$PWD
source $CSPP_SOUNDER_QL_HOME/cspp_sounder_ql_env.sh
cd bin
getall
files=$PWD/NUCAPS-EDR_v3r1_j01_s2024051417*
./ql_level2_image.sh $files NUCAPS --dset temp --pressure 700

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Past blog post entries on Sounder QuickLooks software are here and here.

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10-minute Full Disk sector GOES-18 (GOES-West) Day Land Cloud Fire RGB, Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm), “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) and “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) + Fire Power derived product (a component of the GOES Fire Detection and Characterization Algorithm FDCA) images (above) showed signatures of multiple wildfires across northeastern British Columbia, two of which produced  pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds — having cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures of -40ºC and colder, denoted by shades of blue in the 10.3 µm images — late in the day on 13 May 2024 (these were Canada’s first pyroCb clouds of their 2024 wildfire season, which has gotten off to an unusually early start). Wildfire smoke drifting eastward was intermittently reducing the surface visibility at High Level, Alberta (CYOJ).

The largest of these fires burned very hot, exhibiting 3.9 µm shortwave infrared brightness temperatures of 137.88ºC (the saturation temperature of GOES-18 ABI Band 7 detectors) — with Fire Power values intermittently exceeding 6200 MW (below).

GOES-18 True Color RGB images from the CSPP GeoSphere site (below) displayed the dense plumes of wildfire smoke, with pyroCb clouds produced by the larger, more intense wildfires rising above the tops of the smoke (casting shadows onto the smoke layer below).

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Thousands if not millions of people took colorful photos of the Northern Lights during the early hours of May 11th during a remarkable G5 geomagnetic storm that expanded Aurora Borealis activity southward to unusually low latitudes in the United States.

The JPSS fleet of polar-orbiting spacecraft captured eight monochromatic VIIRS Day Night Band images over North America documenting the historic space weather event from a satellite perspective, archived here for posterity and future research. (click on each individual image to see the full resolution version)

NOAA-20 Day Night Band Images

Suomi-NPP Day Night Band Images

NOAA-21 Day Night Band Images

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