GOES-16 (GOES-East) “Red” Visible (0.64 µm) and Near-Infrared “Snow/Ice” (1.61 µm) images (above) revealed a number of aircraft “hole punch clouds” and cloud dissipation or “distrail” features drifting eastward across southern Lake Michigan and adjacent states on 20 December 2017. These cloud features were caused by aircraft that were either ascending or descending through a layer of cloud composed of supercooled water droplets — cooling from wake turbulence (reference) and/or particles from the jet engine exhaust acting as ice condensation nuclei cause the small supercooled water droplets to turn into larger ice crystals (many of which then often fall from the cloud layer, creating “fall streak holes“). The darker gray appearance of the hole punch clouds on 1.61 µm images confirms that the features were composed of ice crystals (since ice is a strong absorber of radiation at that wavelength).

A good example of a hole punch cloud adjacent to a longer distrail feature was seen over far southeastern Minnesota and the Minnesota/Wisconsin border, using 250-meter resolution Aqua MODIS true-color and false-color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images from the MODIS Today site (below). Glaciated (ice crystal) cloud features appeared as darker shades of cyan in the false-color image.

A very detailed view of a hole punch cloud over Lake Michigan was provided by 30-meter resolution Landsat-8 false-color imagery at 1635 UTC, viewed using RealEarth (below).

===== 21 December Update =====

Another example of numerous aircraft hole punch and distrail cloud features was seen on Terra MODIS true-color and false-color RGB images on 21 December. over northern Illinois and northern Indiana (below).

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The Bezymianni volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula erupted at 0345 UTC on 20 December 2017 — an animation of Himawari-8 Infrared Window (10.4 µm) images and retrieved Ash Cloud Height product from the NOAA/CIMSS Volcanic Cloud Monitoring site (above) indicated that the ash reached heights of 18 km (the Tokyo VAAC estimated the ash height to be 50,000 feet or 15.2 km).

An oblique view using GOES-15 (GOES-West) Visible (0.63 µm) images (below) provided a different perspective of the volcanic cloud immediately following the eruption. The surface report from Shemya (PASY), located in the far western portion of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, is plotted in the lower right corner of the images.

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GOES-16, which has been sending data from the GOES-East position since 14 December, became the operational GOES-East satellite at 2100 UTC on 18 December, succeeding GOES-13 [which itself became GOES-East, succeeding GOES-12, in April 2010; (this post, from April 2003, is the first one with GOES-12 as the operational GOES-East, it took over for GOES-8 that month!) ].  The animation above shows all 16 Bands of the first operational CONUS image from GOES-16.

 

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When GOES-16 shifted from its checkout position at 89.5º W Longitude to its position at 75.2º W Longitude (where it will be operational as GOES-East), the domain for the Continental US (CONUS) domain shifted slightly. In ‘Flex Mode‘ (also known as ‘Mode 3‘) of GOES-16 Scanning (and also in the proposed Mode 6), routine CONUS scans occur every 5 minutes. The image above, courtesy Mat Gunshor of CIMSS, shows the GOES-West CONUS scan in green, the GOES-R CONUS scan from the Check-out Location at 89.5º W Longitude in Red, and the GOES-16 CONUS scan domain in blue.

The center point of the CONUS domain, as documented in Table 5.1.2.7-5 from the GOES-R Product Definition and User’s Guide (PUG), shows a shift from 29.24º North Latitude, 91.41º West Longitude (at the check-out location) to 30.08º North Latitude, 87.1º West Longitude (at the operational GOES-East location).  As a result, the entire island of Puerto Rico is now in the CONUS sector, and the northern boundary has shifted farther north into central and western Canada, by about 100 miles.

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