An active weather pattern has produced another strong storm over the Great Plains of the United States on 18-19 March, and another dust storm. Dust RGB Imagery, above, shows the evolution of the dust plume (in magenta/pink in the RGB) from Mexico into the western Great Lakes. The pink occurs because of a strong contribution from the Split Window Difference (10.3 µm – 12.3 µm) imagery (Quick Guide); an animation of that is here, the dust is brown in the animation. The Split Window Difference is also the Red component of the Night Microphysics RGB (Quick Guide), so that RGB can also give a view of Dust Plumes at night (as shown in this blog post).

VIIRS has a Day Night Band that can be used to detect dust plumes (or smoke plumes) at night, given sufficient lunar illumination. In the 0745 UTC Day Night Band image below, toggled with the GOES-based Dust RGB (one could also compute a Dust RGB image from VIIRS data!), the dust cloud is a apparent from central Texas northward through eastern Oklahoma and eastern Kansas.

Geosphere imagery, below, from 18 March, shows the beginnings of the dust plume near El Paso TX. GOES-16 Aerosol Optical Depth is also plotted in clear skies. El Paso had 1/2-mile visibility due to dust and wind gusts exceeding 50 mph during the afternoon on 18 March.

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1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-18 (GOES-West) Visible images (above) included plots of 30-minute Peak Wind Gusts and hourly Ceiling/Visibility — which showed Peak Wind Gusts as high as 65 kts (75 mph) at METAR sites Roswell, New Mexico (KROW) and El Paso, Texas (KELP), although there were wind gusts to 101 mph at higher elevations (these strong winds in tandem with severe to exceptional drought conditions were conducive to create such a pronounced blowing dust event). The surface visibility was reduced to 1/4 mile (or even near zero) at several sites from El Paso to southern New Mexico.

10-minute Full Disk scan True Color RGB and nighttime Dust RGB images from GOES-18 (GOES-West), GOES-19 (Preliminary/Non-operational) and GOES-16 (GOES-East) created using Geo2Grid (below) displayed distinct signatures of the dense blowing dust that originated over parts of northern Mexico and southern New Mexico — and was subsequently transported northeastward across parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas during the 15-hour period shown. There was also a notable plume of blowing dust/sand whose source was White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico. In addition, of interest was a small circular pocket of dust that became entrained into the center of low pressure that was located near the Colorado/Kansas/Oklahoma border at 0600 UTC.

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Blizzards, dust storms, fires, floods, thunderstorms and tornadoes were the result of very strong back-to-back negatively tilted shortwave troughs through the eastern half of the U.S. From Texas to Wisconsin, New York to Florida, severe wind gusts, large hail, and deadly tornadoes were recorded. The hardest hit states during the three-day severe weather outbreak (as far as thunderstorm hazards are concerned) were Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama.

The GOES-16 ABI water vapor RGB animation below (courtesy of College of Dupage) shows the development and occlusion of the low-pressure system on 3/14-15, evidenced by the beautiful spiral vortex in the middle of the country. On its heels, another shortwave trough further south spawned several rounds of intense thunderstorms, tapping into the rich Gulf moisture on 3/15. This latter system would then menace the eastern U.S. on 3/16, particularly Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The NOAA/CIMSS ProbSevere system of models are used to provide forecasters automated guidance to convective weather threats in the short term, generally 0-60 minutes. While there are plenty of examples to look at, I will focus on some strong tornadic supercells in southern Mississippi.

LightningCast, a trained AI/ML model, uses solely GOES-R ABI data to predict next-hour lightning. It is intended to aid forecasters in providing impact-based decision support (IDSS) to partners, but also to provide general convective initiation guidance. In the line of quickly developing storms from far southwest Mississippi, zipping down into eastern Louisiana, LightningCast was able to give anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes of lead time to lightning initiation (measured from the yellow 30% contour in the animation below). Considering the rapid evolution of these cells, and the overall busy situation of the day, this could really help provide forecasters with some advanced notice of sustained convection in a dangerous environment.

Above: The background is the GOES-16 day-cloud-phase-distinction RGB. The foreground blue-to-red pixels is the GOES-16 GLM flash-extent density. The labeled contours are predictions made by LightningCast.

Once these supercells in Louisiana and southern Mississippi matured, the ProbSevere IntenseStormNet provides an estimate of “intensity” using an image-based AI/ML model. Specifically, it uses images of the 0.64 µm reflectance, 10.3 µm brightness temperature, and GLM flash-extent density to make predictions. While the IntenseStormNet could be used as a satellite-only model for severe weather guidance, it has been incorporated into ProbSevere v3, providing better satellite information at the mature phase of storm development.

Below, in south-central Mississippi, the poor village of Tylertown was hit twice by tornadic supercells in the span of 40 minutes, causing devastating damage. We can see > 90% probabilities from the IntenseStormNet and a string of tornado reports following the line of recent tornado reports. The robust overshooting tops, cold-U/above-anvil cirrus plume signatures, and strong GLM flash cores all contributed to the high probabilities.

Storm chaser Tanner Charles shows the velocity couplets from the Jackson, MS radar passing over very nearly the same location.

Not a loop! Two tornadoes going over the same area twice with 40 minutes of each other. Geez #tornado #mswx pic.twitter.com/1KtnNxV8rA

— Tanner Charles ? (@TannerCharlesMN) March 15, 2025

ProbSevere version 3 is an upgrade to the operational version 2, and uses more radar, satellite, lightning, and short-term NWP data to better predict severe weather hazards such as wind, hail, and tornadoes.

In the first supercell that hit Tylertown, the probability of tornado was 68% at the time of the first NWS tornado warning. This is an extreme value for ProbTor v3. Unsurprisingly, the low-level MRMS AzShear (i.e., low-level rotation) was the top contributor, with the environmental shear, low-level mean wind (closely correlated with 0-1 km shear), and mid-level rotation the next top-contributing predictors. The storm’s flash rate, IntenseStormNet probability, and MLCAPE from the HRRR model provided additional boosts to the probability.

After this first tornadic supercell hit Tylertown, it would produce major tornadoes in Taylorsville, MS, and would go on to produce tornadoes in western Alabama, nearly 200 miles away from Tylertown! The secondary maximum in the ProbTor v3 probability (top center panel, red line) occurred before and during the tornado in western Alabama. Note also how the PTv3 increased before PTv2 as the storm was developing (compare red lines in top left and top center panels), a trend we’ve observed in a number of tornadic storms. ProbSevere v3 is slated to be operational in NOAA this summer (see paper here for more details on the models).

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10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-18 (GOES-West) nighttime Dust RGB and daytime True Color RGB images created using Geo2Grid (above) showed a plume of resuspended ash (shades of pink in Dust RGB, hazy shades of tan in True Color RGB) from the 1912 Novarupta-Katmai eruption in Alaska, which was being transported offshore across the Shelikof Strait toward Kodiak Island on 16 March 2025. Surface volcanic ash within the Valley Of Ten Thousand Smokes was being lofted by strong northwesterly winds (on the back side of a slowly-deepening Gale Force Low located near the southcentral Alaska coast) that were being channeled through the valley.

According to this USGS Volcano Notice, the National Weather Service issued a SIGMET advising that the maximum height of this resuspended ash was 6000 ft.

Other similar resuspended ash events have been documented here on this blog.

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Next-Generation Fire System (NGFS) data within a RealEarth instance (direct link), above, shows the rapid development and growth of multiple fires during the day on 14 March 2025. The RealEarth instance might be an easier way to track fires on an Extreme Fire Weather day like 14 March; the NGFS Alerts Dashboard (https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/ngfs) below (showing only detections in Texas and Oklahoma), in a screenshot from just after 0000 UTC on 15 March), shows many many detections and unless you are keenly aware of Oklahoma geography and county names, it’s hard to know at a glance which fires are which. When plotted on a map as shown above, they are easier to track.

The RealEarth instance has imagery that is probe-able. The probe shown below of the Hickory Hill Road fire lists out different satellite-derived properties at the point probed.

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Multiple Fire Warnings have been issued over Oklahoma. At 2336 UTC, the Norman OK WFO website (above) showed the location of active warnings. The NGFS RealEarth display for that time is shown below. Not all of the fires indicated at that time below have Fire Warning associated with them. A Fire Warning occurs as a request to the NWS Forecast Office by their partners. For example, if you were to click on the map above within the Fire Warning polygon southwest of Stillwater, you would have access to the Fire Warning text shown at bottom, issued at the request of the Oklahoma Forestry Service.

The graphic below, from WFO OUN, testifies to the historic nature of this wildfire outbreak. The extraordinary winds — Stillwater OK airport saw gusts exceeding 70 knots — are helping to drive the fires. The widespread dust is apparent in the RealEarth imagery above

There was a very timely and informative Satellite Book Club presentation on Wildfire operations on 13 March 2025. Click here to listen. A separate CIMSS Blog Post (here) discusses the widespread blowing dust event that occurred as the fires burned.

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