Elsa was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane at 1230 UTC on 02 July 2021 — and 1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) images (above) showed the tropical cyclone during and after the time period that it began to spread hurricane-force winds across the islands of Barbados and St. Lucia. Pulsing overshooting tops exhibited infrared brightness temperatures in the -80 to -87ºC range (shades of purple).

GOES-16 Infrared images with an overlay of deep-layer wind shear from the CIMSS Tropical Cyclones site (below) indicated that Elsa was moving through an environment of low shear.

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As noted here, CIMSS scientist Tim Wagner has created a short python script to read NUCAPS files generated by Community Satellite Processing Package CSPP software and Direct Broadcast (DB) data at UW-Madison CIMSS. The script relies upon several python packages: netCDF4 (version 1.5.7), matplotlib (version 3.4.2), numpy (version 1.21.0) and sharppy. DB NUCAPS files are available from https://ftp.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/eosdb/j01/crisfsr/yyyy_mm_dd_jday_hhmm/edr/ ; Files have names like this:  NUCAPS-EDR_v2r0_j01_s202107020845119_e202107020845417_c202107020928000.nc (similar to the naming convention in NOAA CLASS); the filename above contains one data granule from 08:45:11.9 to 08:45:41.7 on 2 July 2021;  this orbital plot (from here) suggests that data is over the Great Plains of the United States.

The output from the python script is all the NUCAPS profiles from the granule.  There are 30 NUCAPS profiles for each scan line, and 4 scan lines per granule. The animation at top shows the soundings along with a mapping showing their location.

This retrieval of NUCAPS profiles occurred on a quiet weather day: the NUCAPS plot of sounding availability (here) showed mostly ‘green’ points (vs. yellow or red), signifying convergence in the infrared retrieval.  The image below compares the NUCAPS sounding in AWIPS (left) with the one processed via CSPP.  There is good agreement.

NOAA-20 NUCAPS Plot from AWIPS (left) and from CSPP (right) at 0845 UTC on 2 July 2021 for a point near the Nebraska/South Dakota/Wyoming border (Click to enlarge)[/caption

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Night Time Microphysics (at night) and True-Color imagery (during the day) over the eastern Atlantic, 0920 – 1220 UTC on 1 July 2021

Tropical Storm Elsa has formed over the tropical eastern Atlantic Ocean.  True-color imagery from CSPP Geosphere (link) shows the storm with occasional bursts of deep convection.  Elsa has formed at the southern edge of a large area of Saharan Air (shown below, link, from this site), and the storm’s future could be influenced by this dry air.

The abundant dry air to the north of Elsa is also apparent in the low-level water vapor imagery, as shown below.

The dry air associated with the SAL shows up nicely in gridded NUCAPS fields, too. The toggle below steps through the CIMSS True Color RGB and GOES-16 Band 10 imagery (7.34 µm) along with 850-700 mb relative humidity from gridded NUCAPS.

For more information on Elsa, see the SSEC Tropical Website. Official forecasts are on the website of the National Hurricane Center (link; direct link to Elsa’s webpages there)

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GOES-17 (GOES-West) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm), Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.35 µm) images (above) showed the explosive formation of large pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds that were spawned by large wildfires in British Columbia, Canada on 30 June 2021. The 10.35 µm cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures rapidly cooled to the -50 to -60ºC range, easily surpassing the -40ºC pyroCb threshold — and pyroCb 3.9 µm cloud-top infrared brightness temperatures were warmer (darker shades of gray) than those of surrounding meteorological cumulonimbus clouds (due to the presence of smaller ice crystals and smoke particles, which were better reflectors of incoming solar radiation).

GOES-17 Fire Temperature RGB images (below) include surface reports plotted in yellow — note that the temperature reached 115ºF (46.1ºC) at Kamloops (CYKA), just southeast of the largest fire. In addition, farther to the southwest, surface observations at Lytton (CWLY) ceased as of 01 UTC (6 PM local time), as another wildfire began to destroy 90% of that town.

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On a smaller spatial and temporal scale, GOES-17 Visible, Shortwave Infrared and Infrared Window images (above) revealed the brief formation of a pyroCb that was produced by the Lava Fire in far northern California. A portion of the cloud top reached the -40ºC threshold (darker shades of blue) to qualify as a pyroCb.

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