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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A mid-level atmospheric wave with subtle warm-air advection forced some strong thunderstorms in central Texas this morning. The operational high-resolution convection-allowing NWP models did not handle these storms well at all.

ProbSevere LightningCast, an image-based AI model, picked up on the rapidly growing convection about 15-20 minutes before lightning initiation. LightningCast predicts the probability of lightning in the next 60 minutes at any location using GOES-R ABI reflectance and brightness temperature data.

ProbSevere v3 uses machine-learning models to predict next-hour probabilities of severe weather (large hail, damaging wind gusts, tornadoes), by incorporating storm-object tracking and extracting features from radar, satellite, lightning, and short-term NWP data. The animation below shows how the probabilities of any severe weather evolved for these storms as they approached the Dallas-Fort-Worth metro region. Hail up to 1.5″ in diameter was reported.

At 12:44 UTC, ProbSevere v3 (PSv3) probability of severe was 53%, vs. 23% for the operational ProbSevere v2 (PSv2), as seen in Figure 3. A post-mortem analysis revealed that, compared to PSv2, the PSv3 model was able to combine the sub-severe MESH (maximum expected size of hail), ENI flash lightning density, and moderate mid-level azimuthal shear in an environment with high effective shear (> 50 kt) to produce a stronger (and more accurate) probability of severe. PSv3 exceeded 50% four minutes before PSv2, and exceeded 40% eight minutes before PSv2 (see Figure 4). Having more accurate and timely probabilistic guidance prior to reported severe weather is critical in helping the NWS issue more accurate and timely severe weather warnings.

Both ProbSevere v3 and LightningCast will be evaluated by NWS forecasters at the 2023 Hazardous Weather Testbed, held in May and June in Norman, OK.

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