GOES-14 SRSOR 0.62 µm and 10.7 µm Imagery (click image to play animation)

GOES-14 has been brought out of storage for station-keeping maintenance (a north-south maneuver is scheduled for 21 August 2012) and while active, it is providing one-minute imagery over selected regions of the United States. Today’s region of focus is the southeast part of the United States, and the imagery above shows a decaying convective system over southern Alabama that has spawned a well-defined outflow boundary (wind gusts exceeding 30 knots were common with this feature).

Active convection is also indicated over the northern Gulf of Mexico, with numerous overshooting tops. As shown yesterday, the one-minute imagery highlights the quickly-changing nature of the cirrus cloud-top environment. It is not unusual to see pixel brightness temperatures change more than 3 K in one minute.

(Added: There was also SRSOR imagery over Washington D.C. today!)

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GOES-14 SRSOR Visible Imagery (click image to play animation)

GOES-14 will be in Super-Rapid Scan mode for the next several weeks, meaning 1-minute imagery will be available over various footprints. The imagery from Aug 16 2012, above, shows the central United States, with morning convection over the western Great Lakes and convection over the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma.

Friday’s view will be over AL, centered near 35 N, 85 W. See this website for details.

GOES-14 SRSOR 0.62 µm and 10.7 µm Imagery (click image to play animation)

The one-minute imagery allows the satellite to show the ephemeral nature of overshooting tops. Consider the active convection over central Illinois. Cold cloud tops (as cool as -70 C) develop and decay over the 15-minute loop above (the overshoots are evident in the visible imagery as well). Present GOES imagery has a routine refresh rate of every 15 minutes; overshooting tops can easily be missed at that rate. GOES-R will routinely produce imagery every 5 minutes, allowing for better detection of overshooting tops. The images within the loop also show nice examples of transverse banding (over eastern Iowa) and gravity waves propagating outwards from the overshooting tops.

(Added: Click here for a big animated gif image of visible imagery. Size: 69 Mb).

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GOES-14 10.7 µm imagery (click image to play animation)

GOES-14 has been turned on and placed in normal mode for an annual north-south maneuver. It was placed in storage back in November 2010 to preserve battery power and payload (it was briefly brought out of storage in 2011). GOES-14 is overhead at approximately 105 degrees West longitude. The loop above of the 10.7 µm ‘window’ channel shows the first of the images after broadcast was initiated. SRSOR (Super Rapid-Scan Operations — that is, generation of 1-minute imagery over a limited domain) is planned to occur within the next few months, starting on 16 August. Current plans are for the SRSOR to be over Oklahoma on Thursday the 16th, and over the Tropics on Friday the 17th. More information is available here.

GOES-14 Visible Imagery over British Columbia

GOES-14 Visible Imagery over Florida

One of the first tasks when a GOES instrument is reactivated is a testing of the navigation. The two images above show that the accuracy of the navigation has not been affected by the satellite storage.

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Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.7 µm Day/Night Band, 11.45 µm IR, and 11.45-3.74 µm “fog/stratus product” images

A comparison of AWIPS images of the Suomi NPP VIIRS 0.7 µm Day/Night Band (DNB), the 11.45 µm IR channel, and the 11.45-3.74 µm “fog/stratus product” (above) showed well-defined signatures of the aurora borealis (or “Northern Lights”) across central Canada on 09 August 2012. Comparison with the corresponding 11.45 µm IR channel image and the 11.45-3.74 µm “fog/stratus product” confirmed that the brighter DNB features (the wide west-to-east oriented band that stretched across Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, as well as the separate more complex feature over northern Manitoba) were indeed signatures of the aurora, and not high-level or low-level cloud features.

The Auroral Oval map from the Space Weather Prediction Center  (below) showed that the southern edge of the auroral oval extended far southward across Canada at that time.

Space Weather Prediction Center auroral oval map

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