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Oklahoma City and surrounding areas were struck with severe weather last night, the night of Wednesday 2023-04-19. Nine tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma, making a total of 15 tornadoes from the storm system. Tornadoes were also reported in Nebraska and Iowa. This severe weather took the lives of three Oklahomans.... Read More
Oklahoma City and surrounding areas were struck with severe weather last night, the night of Wednesday 2023-04-19. Nine tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma, making a total of 15 tornadoes from the storm system. Tornadoes were also reported in Nebraska and Iowa. This severe weather took the lives of three Oklahomans.
The radar reflectivity south of Norman, Oklahoma showed a distinct rotational pattern, which is noted in the animation below. The rotation can be seen in the reflectivity around the 00:20Z timestamp (7:20 pm local time).
Radar Reflectivity every five minutes over the Oklahoma City area from 2023-04-19 at 22:00Z to 2023-04-20 at 02:50Z. Rotation in the radar signature is annotated near the 00:20Z time stamp. You can recreate this animation in RealEarth.
The Storm Prediction Center, appropriately located in Norman, OK, has issued a slight categorical outlook for today, 2023-04-20.
Geo2grid includes a series of shell scripts that manipulate various satellite inputs to create (beautiful!) full-resolution high-qulality imagery. Geo2grid version 1.1 was released in late 2022 and this blog post shows how to create a new RGB definition and display the data. The Tropical Version of the Airmass RGB is useful because if has better contrast (than in... Read More
Geo2grid includes a series of shell scripts that manipulate various satellite inputs to create (beautiful!) full-resolution high-qulality imagery. Geo2grid version 1.1 was released in late 2022 and this blog post shows how to create a new RGB definition and display the data. The Tropical Version of the Airmass RGB is useful because if has better contrast (than in the traditional airmass RGB) in mid/high-level clouds, giving a 24-hour view of cold cloud tops (that you might view in daytime with the Convection RGB, for example). The Pacific Tropical Air Mass RGB in use at the NWS in Guam, for example, has the same Red and Blue RGB components as the Air Mass RGB: Red is the Split Water Vapor Difference (Band 8 – Band 10, with values from -26.2 to 0.6oC; Blue is the Upper-Level water vapor brightness temperature, from -29.25 to -64.45oC). However, the Green Band values, Band 12 – Band 13, are changed from -43.2 to 6.7oC for the airmass RGB to -26.2 to 27.4oC for the Pacific Tropical Airmass RGB. How is this new definition implemented?
The images displayed below are from Himawari-9 AHI data. New RGB definitions must be input in two different files within geo2grid, in $GEO2GRID_HOME/etc/polar2grid/enhancements/ahi.yaml and $GEO2GRID_HOME/etc/polar2grid/composites/ahi.yaml ; if you were creating definitions for ABI data, then abi.yaml files would have to be changed. The addition to the ahi.yaml file in the composites directory is shown below. The name of the RGB is ‘pactropicalairmass’ and its three components are the B08 – B10 difference, the B12 – B13 difference, and Band 08.
The ahi.yaml file in the enhancement directory must be amended, as shown below. This snippet of code describes a stretch of the data for the three RGB components: from -26.2 to 0.6, from -26.2 to 27.4, and from 243.9 to 208.5 for Red, Green and Blue, respectively. Note in this case that the blue stretch is actually inverted, from warm to cold. If brightness temperature difference fields are being described, use oC. If simple brightness temperatures are being described, use Kelvin.
It’s always a good idea to test geo2grid with the –list-products-all flag, to see if the input definition is understood, and indeed, when that was done, the output (that has been edited) below was produced. The ‘pactropicalairmass’ RGB is understood.
../geo2grid.sh -r ahi_hsd -w geotiff --list-products-all -f /path_to_data/himawari09/ahi/2023/2023_04_19_109/0000/*FLDK*
INFO : Sorting and reading input files...
INFO : Loading product metadata from files...
### Custom User Products
*pactropicalairmass
*true_color_night
### Non-standard Satpy Products
[long list snipped to save space]
### Standard Available Geo2Grid Products
B01 B02 B03 B04 B05 B06 B07 B08 B09 B10 B11 B12 B13 B14 B15 B16
airmass ash dust fog natural_color night_microphysics true_color
The geo2grid call below will create both the ‘regular’ airmass RGB and the ‘pactropical’ airmass RGB, in this case on 20 April 2023 at 0000 UTC for a pre-defined ‘Guam’ map (the p2g_grid_helper.sh call that created the Guam map is in this blog post). The output are geotiff files.
The toggle below compares the two fields from 0000 UTC 20 April 2023. Coastlines and lat/lon grid lines were added using this command within the geo2grid package: add_coastlines.sh --add-coastlines --add-grid --grid-d 10.0 10.0 --grid-D 10.0 10.0 --grid-text-size 14 *.tif
AIrmass RGB and Pacific Tropical Airmass RGB, 0000 UTC on 20 April 2023 (Click to enlarge)
CSPP Geo2grid (free!) software is available for download here. A one-time registration is required.
1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) images from all 16 of the ABI spectral bands (above) displayed signatures of a SpaceX Starship rocket launched from the Starbase facility in Boca Chica Beach, Texas at 1333 UTC on 20 April 2023. The rocket booster condensation cloud was evident in images from all 16... Read More
GOES-16 images of ABI spectral bands 01-16, plus a Rocket Plume RGB [click to play animated GIF | MP4]
1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) images from all 16 of the ABI spectral bands (above) displayed signatures of a SpaceX Starship rocket launched from the Starbase facility in Boca Chica Beach, Texas at 1333 UTC on 20 April 2023. The rocket booster condensation cloud was evident in images from all 16 spectral bands, drifting slowly eastward away from the launch site — and the ascending rocket booster’s thermal signature was seen in Near-Infrared and Infrared spectral bands 04-16, as well as Plume RGB images.
There was some overlap of the 2 GOES-16 Mesoscale Domain Sectors, which provided images at 30-second intervals (below) that better captured a signature of the rocket explosion at 1337 UTC (triggered by activation of the flight termination system at an altitude near 39 km, due to rocket booster anomalies) — which occurred along the extreme southern edge of Mesoscale Sector 1 coverage.
30-second GOES-16 images of ABI Near-Infrared and Infrared spectral bands 04-16, plus a Rocket Plume RGB [click to play animated GIF | MP4]
The rocket explosion at 1337 UTC was bright enough to be interpreted as lightning by the GLM instrument (below).
GOES-16 Rocket Plume RGB images, with and without an overlay of GLM Flash Extent Density [click to play animated GIF | MP4]
1-minute GOES-16 True Color RGB images from the CSPP GeoSphere site (below) revealed a shadow that was cast by the rocket condensation cloud onto the top of inland stratus clouds across South Texas.
GOES-16 True Color RGB images [click to play MP4 animation]
JMA Himawari-9 Near-Infrared “Vegetation” (0.86 µm) images (above) showed the southwest-to-northeast transect of a hybrid solar eclipse shadow as it moved across the South Indian Ocean and passed over parts of Australia, Indonesia and the West Pacific Ocean on 20 April 2023. A portion of the shadow also moved over Tropical Storm... Read More
JMA Himawari-9 Near-Infrared “Vegetation” (0.86 µm) images [click to play animated GIF | MP4]
JMA Himawari-9 Near-Infrared “Vegetation” (0.86 µm) images (above) showed the southwest-to-northeast transect of a hybrid solar eclipse shadow as it moved across the South Indian Ocean and passed over parts of Australia, Indonesia and the West Pacific Ocean on 20 April 2023. A portion of the shadow also moved over Tropical Storm Sanvu in the North Pacific.
