GOES-16 (GOES-East) Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and Day Land Cloud RGB images (above) showed the subtle signature of black smoke which resulted from a vehicle accident and fire (several miles west of Interstate 94) in far southeastern Wisconsin on 14 June 2022. The smoke plume quickly dispersed as it moved rapidly northeastward. Even though the fire was quite small, a single 3.9 µm pixel located over the crash site briefly peaked at a brightness temperature of 40.06ºC at 1546 UTC (single image | animation).

GOES-16 True Color RGB images created using Geo2Grid (below) provided another view of the brief black smoke plume.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) include time-matched SPC Storm Reports — and showed the development severe thunderstorms across parts of eastern Nebraska, southern Iowa and northeastern Kansas during the afternoon and early evening hours on 11 June 2022. In Kansas, rows of boundary layer feeder bands could be seen flowing northeastward into the growing Mesoscale Convective System. These storms produced several tornadoes, hail as large as 5.00 inches in diameter and damaging winds as strong as 83 mph.

In the corresponding 1-minute GOES-16 “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) images (below), pulsing overshooting tops exhibited infrared brightness temperatures as cold as -80ºC (violet pixels embedded within areas of bright white).

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A sequence of Suomi-NPP VIIRS Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.74 µm) and Infrared Window (11.45 µm) images at 2149 UTC and 2332 UTC (above) showed “before” and “after” views of a  pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) cloud that developed south of McGrath, Alaska late in the day on 11 June 2022. The coldest cloud-top infrared brightness temperature of the pyroCb cloud on the 2332 image was -48C.

A couple of hours later, preliminary / non-operational GOES-18 “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) images (below) showed that the Little Hog Butte Fire — located southwest of Lake Minchumina (PAMH) — produced a larger and more long-lived pyroCb cloud, which then drifted east-northeastward from the fire source region. The coldest cloud-top infrared brightness temperature of that pyroCb cloud was around -48C. Smoke from this fire was reducing the surface visibility to 2 miles at times at Lake Minchumina. Particularly noteworthy was the fact that this was the first documented pyroCb over Alaska in 2 years.

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

Overlapping 1-minute Mesoscale Sectors provided GOES-18 imagery at 30-second intervals — and “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) images (above) showed the development of showers and thunderstorms across western New Mexico and far eastern Arizona on 11 June 2022.

In northeastern New Mexico, another feature of interest was the bright reflection of sunlight from large solar panel arrays at a facility located just west of Interstate 25 in northeastern New Mexico (below). Similar to a 2019 example observed with GOES-17 in California, long vertical “stripes” emanating from the bright reflection signature — extending both northward and southward from the solar farm — were likely related to saturated ABI detector column amplifiers, due to an excess charge induced by intense sunlight reflection off the large solar panels.

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