From the CIMSS Satellite Blog mailbag:

This morning Lufthansa flight DLH469 AUS-IAD at FL370 0011Z at 34.9198N 89.5592W turbulence event, with 4 minor injuries. Your product (ed. note: The CIMSS Turbulence Product, available here) had highlighted the area up pretty well!

The Flight Log for this Airbus A330, snipped from the FlightAware website (direct link), below, shows the changes in speed/altitude that occurred with this event.

The CIMSS Turbulence product at 0000 UTC, just before that event is shown below. Note that 34.9198^oN / 89.5592^oW is very near the middle of the Mississippi/Tennessee border.

The animation from 2300 UTC on 1 March through 0100 UTC on 2 March, below, shows a general expansion of the area with larger MOG Probabilities along the northern Mississippi border with Tennessee.

Radar imagery from NQA, shown below (courtesy Don Eick, NTSB), shows the path of the plane into the observed convection.

What did the satellite imagery show for this event? Band 8 (Upper level water vapor, 6.19 µm) and Band 13 (Clean Window, 10.3 µm) infrared imagery, below, shows the plane flying through a region of developing convection. How adept are you at picking out the region of convection associated with this turbulence?

The imagery below brackets the time of the convection, and the region of turbulence is circled. The satellite imagery shows multiple convective towers erupting.

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The plane diverted to Dulles (KIAD) because of injuries on board. The screencapture below is from an Instagram user on board the plane. Flight information from FlightAware shows that the flight continued for about an hour after the turbulence before the diversion to Dulles.

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RADARSAT-2 overflew the Samoan Islands shortly after sunset on 4 March 2023, as shown above. The NRCS and derived wind fields show light winds over the entire region. The toggle below show Metop-B and Metop-C ASCAT winds between 0800 and 1000 UTC on 5 March. Those instruments also detect light winds.

MIMIC Total Precipitable water fields, below, from 0000 UTC 04 March through 0000 UTC 06 March, show the Samoan islands north of an active storm path (cyclone Kevin moves from 170^oE to 170^oW during the animation, the remains of cyclone Judy move from 170^oW to 150^oW during the animation), and south of a region of moisture moving in slowly from the east.

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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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