GOES-16 (GOES-East) True Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images created using Geo2Grid (above) showed plumes of smoke drifting across parts of Colorado on 30 September 2020. The most smoke prominent plume originated from the Mullen Fire in far southern Wyoming — which produced a pyroCb cloud on 19 September.

On the following morning, the hazy signature of low-altitude smoke that had settled overnight into the North Park and Middle Park plateau areas of north-central Colorado was evident in CIMSS Natural Color RGB images (below). During the morning hours, this smoke restricted the surface visibility to 1-3/4 mile at Walden and 5 miles at Kremmling, before gradually beginning to disperse in the afternoon hours.

The signature of North Park and Middle Park plateau smoke was more vivid using GOES-16 True Color imagery which includes a correction for Rayleigh scattering (below).

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NOAA-20 overflew a mostly clear northern Gulf of Mexico shortly after 1900 UTC on 1 October. Advanced Clear-Sky Processor for Ocean (ACSPO) sea-surface temperatures, shown above, were derived by CSPP (the Community Satellite Processing Package) using Direct Broadcast data at CIMSS (Training for Direct Broadcast data is available here). The AWIPS-ready datafiles are available via an LDM pull to forecast offices.

Near-shore Sea-Surface temperatures have cooled to around 80. The default enhancement used in AWIPS has been narrowed to show temperatures only from 68ºF to 90ºF. Warmer offshore waters are present, but cloudiness over the central Gulf prevented SST detection. The warmest waters in the scene are in Lake Maurepas in Louisiana, and in various bays (Mobile, Perdido, Pensacola). A zoomed-in scene is shown below. Because this product uses the I-Bands on VIIRS, it has extraordinary horizontal resolution.

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VIIRS True-Color imagery taken from the VIIRS Today website, above, shows the reddening/yellowing of trees over the upper midwest between 2 September and 22 September 2020. The inexorable slip into autumn and winter is ongoing.

Early in the morning on 24 September, Direct Broadcast NOAA-20 data downloaded at CIMSS and processed with CSPP showed an extensive aurora over much of Canada. (These data are available from the Direct Broadcast ftp site: link; direct link to the NOAA-20 data used below: link — note that this direct link is ephemeral and will disappear after about a week). The Day Night Band imagery is toggled with 11.45 µm infrared imagery.

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Suomi-NPP’s descending pass at ~0730 UTC (shown here, from this site), had an ideal path — moving south from far eastern Upper Michigan to western Lower Michigan — to view all five Great Lakes.  Sprawling High Pressure and the attendant clear skies meant that a good basin wide view of the lake temperatures was observed, as shown above. (DB imagery from this pass is also available for a short time at the CIMSS DB ftp site) These ACSPO (Advanced Clear-Sky Processor for Ocean) SST fields are available to NWS offices via LDM fields. The default color bar in AWIPS has been changed so that only temperatures between 45º F and 70º F are shown

Lake Temperatures in the imagery above range, for Lake Superior from 47.5º (east of Minnesota) to 66º (just off southwest Upper Michigan); for Lake Michigan from 57º (east of Sheboygan WI) to 67º (mid-lake, east of Chicago); for Lake Huron from 55º (in northwestern Georgian Bay and also northwestern Lake Huron) to 65º (far southern Lake Huron); for Lake Erie from 63º (western Lake Erie) to 69º (central Lake Erie); for Lake Ontario from 62º (western Lake Ontario) to 67º (eastern Lake Ontario).

This view of the Great Lakes from early in September (also from the CIMSS DB site, processed with CSPP), shows — with a color bar that ranges from 41ºF to 86ºF — much warmer water, especially in Lake Superior where the coolest mid-lake temperatures were in the mid-50s. Storms and vertical mixing since early September have cooled the surface waters. GLERL has a website that shows modeled lake surface temperatures, accessible here.

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