CSPP Geosphere, often featured on this blog, is a website which allows users to view near-real-time imagery of GOES-East and GOES-West ABI data. All sixteen spectral bands on the ABI are available to view, along with RGB imagery. Full disk products are available, along with Continental United States (CONUS) and the two mesoscale sectors. Every ten-minute Full disk frame of data is included on CSPP Geosphere. The data is archived back approximately two weeks, allowing users to look at past events. The interface of the CSPP site allows the user to select specific time frames they are interested in viewing. CSPP allows users to save animations with 144 or fewer frames, making the frame selection tool very useful.

To create an animation like the one below, the user can select a frame every third hour, going back seven days. This creates a weekly animation, showing frames every three hours (0000Z, 0300Z, 0600Z, 0900Z, etc.) for each day.

The video shows a fairly active week for cyclones in the Atlantic. Hurricane Lee made landfall on 2023-09-16 as a post-tropical cyclone on the western coast of Nova Scotia. There is also Hurricane Margot, which has veered to the east to the mid-Atlantic, far away from any coastline.

On 2023-09-17, the structure which will become Hurricane Nigel becomes quite apparent. It is designated a hurricane on 2023-09-18 at 0900Z. By 2023-09-19 at 0300Z, the rotational structure is clear and an eye is apparent. On 2023-09-20 around 1200Z, Nigel’s path begins to move eastward. It is forecast to devolve into an extratropical cyclone and currently poses no threat to human populations.

The full disk animation from CSPP Geosphere allows users to view many interesting weather phenomena over the Atlantic Ocean. Along with the lifecycles of hurricanes, one can see large amounts of dust blowing off of the Sahara Desert in West Africa. At the mouth of the Amazon River, there is visible river sediment outflow from the Amazon’s delta and estuary.

View only this post Read Less

GOES-West imagery, above, from the CSPP Geosphere site, shows Hawaii in a tradewind regime (direct link to animation). The animation, from 0121 to 0556 UTC on 21 September 2023, shows the steady progression of cloud lines moving east-to-west, with embedded regions of apparent showers that generate outflow boundaries. At 0431 UTC, Sentinel-1A overflew the eastern Hawai’ian islands, and a high-resolution picture of the surface winds resulted (Data are available online as well: Normalized Radar Cross Section Data, and Winds). The three wind footprints are stitched together below.

Strong winds — nearly 30 knots — are associated with a modest looking (and decaying) convective cell just to the east of Maui. None of the convection in this scene reaches particularly high into the atmosphere; cloud top brightness temperatures are in the 5-10^o C range. The Hilo Sounding at 0000 UTC on 21 September 2023 shows a tradewind inversion top at 750 hPa, suggesting the clouds reached to about that level. (The strong winds of the Alenuihaha channel are also shown!) Note also the strong winds in the lee of the Big Island of Hawai’i.

---

Sentinel orbits are such that exact repeats occur every 12 days. The Ocean Virtual Laboratory allows a user to track the overpasses.

View only this post Read Less

1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) included time-matched (+/- 3 minutes) plots of SPC Storm Reports — which showed severe thunderstorms that moved eastward and southeastward across parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas on 19 September 2023.

1-minute GOES-16 “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images (below) indicated that the coldest pulsing overshooting tops associated many of the storms exhibited infrared brightness temperatures in the -60 to -65ºC range (darker shades of red). These thunderstorms produced a tornado in Kansas, hail up to 2.75 inches in diameter in Texas and damaging winds up to 74 mph in Oklahoma.

5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-16 Visible images with overlays of the CAPE, Lifted Index and Total Precipitable Water derived products (below) showed that these storms intensified as they moved into a corridor of instability and moisture. CAPE values were as high as 1400 J/kg, LI values reached -6ºC and TPW values exceeded 1.60 in.

View only this post Read Less

Daily imagery from the CSPP Geosphere website above, at 0400 UTC from 12-19 September, show haze (highlighted by the blue arrows) moving across the Pacific Ocean. The haze is likely a by-product of the ongoing eruption at Kilauea. The initial burst of haze moved beyond the view of GOES-West by 19 September, but imagery shows other regions of haze are following behind. The haze has moved into the western Pacific, and has affected visibility in the northern Marianas Islands, as noted in the Forecast Discussion from the National Weather Service in Guam, shown below.

Multi-spectral satellite imagery from earlier this morning showed a
narrow band of haze reaching the Marianas along easterly trade-wind
flow pointing back to the Hawaii region. This haze has occasionally
dropped visibility at the Saipan airport earlier this morning, but
appears to have improved slightly in the afternoon hours. It is
likely that this haze originated from the recent Kilauea activity
from September 10th-16th of last week. High uncertainty remains to
exactly for how long this haze might persist, but it is expected to
be perceivable through at least Wednesday morning.

The image below, from the Guam NWS Facebook page, shows Garapan on Saipan.

---

The progression of haze from Hawaii to the Marianas is more easily viewed in a map that includes both Hawaii and Guam. Daily views (all at 0400 UTC as in the animation above) of GOES-18 Band 1 (0.47 µm) imagery show the haze approaching the Marianas by 0400 UTC on 18 September.

The toggle below of GOES-18 and Himawari-9 Band 1 imagery, both at 0400 UTC on 17 September, shows the importance of view angle relative to the Sun in detecting the presence of haze. Haze that is apparent in GOES-18 imagery (near 160^oE) is not apparent in Himawari-9 imagery because of differences in view angle and the location of the Sun relative to the satellite.

_________________________________________

JMA Himawari-9 True Color RGB images created using Geo2Grid (above) helped to highlight the westward transport of hazy volcanic smog (vog) from Hawai`i to the Mariana Islands during the 13-18 September time period. A plot of surface report data from Saipan Island (below) indicated that the surface visibility dropped as low as 5-6 miles (from 2100-2200 UTC on 18 September, or 7-8 AM ChST on 19 September) when the vog arrived. The satellite imagery was certainly convincing, but HYSPLIT model back trajectories also helped to implicate Kilauea vog as the source of haziness observed at Saipan (with subsidence occurring during the period of long-range transport).

---

Thanks to Brandon Aydlett, the Science and Operations Officer at Guam, for the alert on the haze.

View only this post Read Less