The five-day composite of the VIIRS flood product is just one flood product that can be viewed in RealEarth. VIIRS is an instrument aboard SNPP and NOAA-20, which are low earth orbiting satellites. This means that while only two daytime observations may be retrieved per day over a given region, the spatial resolution of 375-m is quite highly resolved. VIIRS flood composites, such as the five-day composite, provide the “maximal flood extent” during flood events. More information about VIIRS and other satellite flood products can be found here.

In areas of Bangladesh and northwest India, persistent rains have caused recent heavy flooding. Millions of people have already been displaced and the flooding is forecast to continue. The VIIRS five-day flood product composite over a six-day time period can be seen below, with the 7-day CMORPH2 satellite-derived precipitation accumulation product. Comparing the images, the spatial placement of flooding with accumulated precipitation coincides well.

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Q: Can geostationary imagers see the very thin, very high Noctilucent Clouds? A: Yes and no, depending on the satellite, how data are processed, time of the year, time of the day and spectral band. Thanks to Simon Proud for this tweet using JMA‘s Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI):

Whoa, awesome view of #Noctilucent clouds over the North pole, seen by Japan's #Himawari satellite on the afternoon of 20th June.

This is one of the clearest views of noctilucent clouds I've ever seen, wonderful! pic.twitter.com/PZ8jAgOpW8

— Simon Proud (@simon_sat) June 21, 2022

Since NOAA’s ABI is a similar instrument to AHI it seems likely that ABI can also observe noctilucent clouds at times. Noctilucent clouds are possibly only observable in visible bands when they are off the earth’s edge, with space as a background, and when illuminated from certain angles. However, due to ground system processing in the generation of the ABI radiance files, most users cannot see data that the ABI scans off the Earth’s edge in space. Special processing of ABI data does allow to show off Earth pixels, such as in these examples with the moon and the Webb Space Telescope plume in space. Recall that the AHI Full Disk is made up of 23 swaths (as opposed to 22 for the ABI), so it scans a bit more space both north and south of the Earth.

An animation including the AHI 3.9 micrometer band shows the relationship between the Earth’s edge and the apparent cloud location. (A animated gif version.) Consider also the large apparent displacement of these high altitude (“shining at night”) clouds due to parallax.

Also see this image:

A fine display of #NoctilucentClouds just before midnight on June 20, across the northern sky. This was from latitude 51° N in southern Alberta, Canada. @NLCalerts pic.twitter.com/Miq2ckV2ni

— Alan Dyer (@amazingskyguy) June 21, 2022

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GOES-16 (GOES-East) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Day Land Cloud Fire RGB images (above) revealed several hail damage swaths — which appeared as brighter shades of yellow in the NDVI images, and shades of brown in the RGB images — across parts of Nebraska and Iowa on 20 June 2022. The swaths of cropland damage were the result of wind-driven hail events that occurred on 06 June, 07 June and 14 June. One of the swaths was nearly 90 miles long (due to a series of training thunderstorms), with some swaths as wide as 10 miles in places.

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GOES-18 images in this blog post are preliminary and non-operational

Overlapping 1-minute Mesoscale Sectors provided 30-second GOES-18 Water Vapor, Near-Infrared and Shortwave Infrared images (above) that revealed thermal signatures of the SpaceX launch of the SARah-1 Mission from Vandenberg Space Force Station in California at 14:19:00 UTC on 18 June 2022.

Signatures of Falcon 9’s Stage 1 booster were seen immediately post-launch (for example, at 14:21:55 UTC, above), as well during its “entry burn” to initiate a launch site landing (at 14:26:25 UTC, below).

Of particular interest was the brief expansion of hot water vapor and CO2 produced by initiation of the Stage 1 “boostback burn” (as seen in Water Vapor and Shortwave Infrared images at 14:22:55 UTC, below).

Plume RGB images (below) provided an integrated view of the rocket booster’s hot/bright thermal signature as well as the expanding cloud of water vapor / CO2.

A schematic of the Stage 1 trajectory is shown below.

Kudos to Todd Beltracci, The Aerospace Corporation, for providing a heads-up on this rocket launch.

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