EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 High Resolution Visible (0.8 µm) images (above; click to play animation; also available as an MP4 movie file) revealed the hazy signature of what appeared to be a ribbon of smoke aloft being transported eastward across the North Atlantic Ocean by the circulation of a large area of low pressure (surface | 500 hPa) on 17 July 2015. Early in the day, the smoke feature stretched from the east coast of Greenland to the central Atlantic Ocean; by the end of the day, the leading edge of the smoke had moved over the British Isles and was headed toward Scandinavia.

A portion of the smoke plume could be seen on Aqua MODIS and Suomi NPP VIIRS true-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) images (below) as it was approaching the southern portion of Great Britain.

On the following morning, Meteosat-10 visible images (below; click to play animation) showed that the leading edge of the smoke ribbon was moving over southern Norway.

The transport pathway of this smoke feature was rather interesting, as we shall explore with the following sets of images.

The 2015 wildfire season in Alaska had been very active — as of 17 July, it was rated as the 4th worst in terms of total acreage burned. In early July, numerous wildfires burning across the interior of Alaska were producing a large amount of smoke, as can be seen in a comparison of of Suomi NPP VIIRS 3.74 µm shortwave IR and 0.64 µm visible channel images at 2131 and 2312 UTC on 06 July (above). The thermal signature of the wildfire “hot spots” showed up as yellow to red to black pixels on the 2 shortwave IR images, while the widespread smoke plumes from the fires are evident on the 2 visible images; even in the relatively short 101 minutes separating the two sets of VIIRS images, notable changes in fire activity could be seen.

Looking a bit farther to the north and west, a sequence of VIIRS 0.64 µm visible images centered over Cape Lisburne (station identifier PALU) in northwestern Alaska covering a 2-day period from 06 to 08 July (below) showed the initial transport of large amounts of smoke from the interior of Alaska northwestward over the Chukchi Sea between Alaska and Russia.

Daily composites of Suomi NPP OMPS Aerosol Index covering the period of 04-17 July (below; courtesy of Colin Seftor; see his OMPS Blog post) showed the strong signal of this dense Alaskan smoke (denoted by the red arrows) as it moved from east to west over the far southern Arctic Ocean and along the far northern coast of Russia from 06-10 July. The Aerosol Index signal seemed to stall north of Scandinavia on 12-13 July, but then a small portion began to move toward Iceland and Greenland on 13-15 July around the periphery of a large upper-level low (500 hPa analyses). Finally, some of this smoke was then transported eastward across the Atlantic Ocean around the southern periphery of this upper-level low on 17 July, as was seen on the Meteosat-10 visible images at the beginning of this blog post.

CALIOP lidar data from the CALIPSO satellite (below) showed the vertical distribution of the Alaskan smoke over and off the coast of northern Norway on 11 July. The signal of the smoke was located in the center portion of the images; while there appeared to be some smoke at various altitudes within the middle to upper troposphere, a significant amount of smoke was seen in the lower stratosphere in the 10-12 km altitude range.

View only this post Read Less

Suomi NPP VIIRS (above; toggle with Google maps) and Aqua MODIS (below; toggle with Google maps) true-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) images visualized using SSEC RealEarth showed 2 smoke plumes from wildfires burning in Greece on 17 July 2015. These fires were causing evacuations in some areas, according to the Wildfire Today site.

Surface observations around the time of the images (below) indicated that air temperatures were in the 90-100º F (32.2-37.8º C) range at many sites across the region. Winds at Athens were from the northeast at 26 knots, with gusts to 36 knots (time series plot of surface data). Near the edge of the larger smoke plume to the southwest, the surface visibility was restricted to 5 miles at Kithira (but was as low as 3 miles at 10 UTC: time series plot of surface data).

EUMETSAT Meteosat-10 High Resolution Visible (0.8 µm) and shortwave IR (3.92 µm) images (below; click to play animation; also available as an MP4 movie file) showed thee temporal evolution of the smoke plume and the associated fire hot spots (dark black to red pixels). Athens is located within the cyan circle on the images.

View only this post Read Less

On 07 June 2007, severe thunderstorms moved through the Upper Midwest (blog post on that event), spawning strong tornadoes; from the SPC Storm Reports comments:

HUNDREDS OF TREES DOWN NORTH OF ZOAR. (GRB)

NUMEROUS TREES DOWN OF 1 FOOT DIAMETER AND GREATER. TRACK WAS APPROXIMATELY 1/4 MILE IN LENGTH AND 125 YARDS WIDE (MQT)

Terra MODIS data on 09 June 2007 (in the image above, at left) showed a tornado scar (much longer than 1/4 mile in length) running southwest-to-northeast through heavily forested Menominee County into Langlade County and then Oconto County in northeast Wisconsin. Terra MODIS True-Color imagery from 15 July 2015 (also in the image above, at right) (cropped from imagery at the MODIS Today website), shows that a scar persists more than 8 years later! (This persistent scar has been mentioned before on this blog here in 2009 and here in 2011).

Landsat-8 overflew northeast Wisconsin on 15 July 2015, at nearly the same time as the Terra MODIS imagery above, and those views, captured via SSEC‘s RealEarth are shown below. The scar is more evident in the shortwave infrared (Band 6, 1.61 µm) than the visible (Band 3, 0.56 µm) because the shortwave infrared channel is more sensitive to changes in vegetation. Lakes are also far more apparent in the 1.61 µm imagery because water absorbs 1.61 µm radiation; little is scattered back to the satellite for detection and water therefore appears black.

===========================================================In April 2011, an historic tornadic event occurred over the Deep South that spawned numerous strong long-track tornadoes (blog post). The tornado paths from this event were also visible from both MODIS and GOES imagery (Link). The animation below shows MODIS true color imagery from before the tornadoes, from several days after, and from early May this year. Three distinct tornado scars remain in Alabama: One runs from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, a second is south of Tuscaloosa, and a third is north of Tuscaloosa.

View only this post Read Less

GOES-13 sounder Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) derived product images (above; click to play animation) showed a large cluster of of severe thunderstorms that developed in eastern Kansas and moved southeastward across southern Missouri into northern Arkansas during the day on 14 July 2015. Due to strong surface heating and ample low-level moisture ahead of the storms, the atmosphere became quite unstable with GOES sounder CAPE values reaching the 5800-6000 J/kg range (lighter violet color enhancement) by 16 UTC. A long swath of damaging winds (SPC storm reports) was produced by these storms.

The visible and infrared images below show snapshots of this severe convective cluster at 3 different times, using high-resolution data from instruments on polar-orbiting satellites: Terra MODIS at 1657 UTC, Suomi NPP VIIRS at 1851 UTC, and POES AVHRR at 1916 UTC. The coldest cloud-top IR brightness temperatures were -83º C on the MODIS image, -86º C on the VIIRS image, and -87º C on the AVHRR image.

View only this post Read Less