Only 2 days after Cyclone Judy, Cyclone Kevin traversed the far southern islands of Vanuatu on 03 March 2023 — and due to a favorable environment of low deep-layer wind shear coupled with warm Sea Surface Temperature, the storm reached Category 3 Intensity at 1800 UTC. Kevin displayed a distinct eye, with feeder bands wrapping into the storm center, in DMSP-17 SSMIS Microwave (85 GHz) imagery at 1848 UTC (below).

Kevin continued to strengthen during the day, reaching Category 4 intensity (130 knot wind speed) at 0000 UTC on 04 March (SATCON) — JMA Himawari-9 Infrared Window (10.4 µm) images (below) showed a well-defined eye, surrounded by cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures in the -80ºC to -90ºC range.

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GOES-16 (GOES-East) Air Mass RGB images (above) include plots of time-matched Local Storm Reports — which showed some of the impacts of a deep low pressure system (surface analyses) that moved northeastward across the Tennessee and Ohio Valley on 03 March 2023. 

A Mesoscale Domain Sector was positioned over part of that area — and 1-minute GOES-16 “Red” Visible  (0.64 µm) images (below) included time-matched (+/- 3 minutes) plots of SPC Storm Reports. Tornadoes, wind gusts to 77 mph and hail of 1.00 inch diameter were reported.

This storm also set new all-time record low pressures at a few locations.

RECORD LOW PRESSURES: Several long-standing all-time low-pressure records have been set today as a result of a very strong storm system centered over the Lower Ohio River Valley. See the graphic below to learn more: pic.twitter.com/J97bXysNnY

— NWS Weather Prediction Center (@NWSWPC) March 4, 2023

The lowest pressure record (977.5 hPa) was set at Evansville, Indiana — a plot of their weather conditions is shown below.

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The Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on RADARSAT Constellation Mission-2 (RCM-2) satellite sampled the winds over the western half of Cyclone Judy at 0700 UTC on 2 March 2023, as shown in the toggle above that also includes the GOES-18 Band 13 Clean Window infrared (10.3 µm) imagery. Peak winds are 41 m/s in the southern eyewall, and strongest winds are in general in the southern part of the eyewall (as shown in this analysis). The coldest cloud tops also are over the southern part of the storm’s eyewall. (Previous blog post on Judy is here)

The toggle below compares the derived winds with the Normalized Radar Cross Section (NRCS) imagery, taken from this website. Additional information on the SAR wind distributions around the eye of Judy are available at the SAROPS Tropical Cyclone Judy website.

The mp4 animation below shows Cyclone Judy in the hours bracketing the SAR overpass above. One overshooting top in the eyewall is apparent just as the sun set on the storm at 0630 UTC. Total Precipitable Water fields from MIMIC-2 (link), below, show Judy moving southeastward — followed by Cyclone Kevin. For more information on these two storms, refer to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center or the Fiji Tropical Cyclone Warning Center or the CIMSS Tropical Website.

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Overlapping 1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sectors provided GOES-16 (GOES-East) images at 30-second intervals from all 16 of the ABI spectral bands (above), which displayed the northeast-moving warm thermal signature of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket booster as the Crew-6 Mission was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 0534 UTC (12:34 AM EST) on 02 March 2023. The low-altitude rocket launch condensation cloud was also evident in imagery from the Infrared bands (07-16), drifting slowly eastward away from the launch site. One or both of these rocket launch signatures were detected by all 16 of the ABI spectral bands, as well as Plume RGB images — although the nighttime reflectance values in Visible bands 01 and 02 were quite small (cursor sample), and difficult to discern using the default Visible enhancement (unless one zoomed in for a much closer view).

GOES-16 images from ABI spectral bands 07-09 along with the Night Plume RGB (below) later displayed a thermal signature of the Falcon 9 Stage 1 entry burn at 0541 UTC well off the coast of South Carolina, which slowed its rate of descent back toward the surface (for a recovery landing on an offshore drone ship).

For this Stage 1 entry burn, close-up 16-panel images from each of the 16 ABI spectral bands (below) showed that reflectance and/or thermal signatures were detected by nearly all of the bands (except 13, 14 and 15) — including subtle nighttime reflectance values in Visible bands 01 and 02, as seen in cursor sampling of all 16 bands.

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