The GOES-East Sea Spray RGB captured sea spray in the southern and eastern quadrants of a storm-force low in the Western Atlantic on 23 April 2024. The Sea Spray RGB depicts sea spray by combining visible and infrared (IR) bands and is available for the GOES-East, GOES-West, Himawari-9, Meteosat-9/10, and JPSS satellites. Sea spray can reduce visibilities for vessels and can also cause icing in a favorable environment.
The West Atlantic 24 Hour Surface Forecast issued by the Ocean Prediction Center (OPC) on 22 April 2024 showed a 997 mb low pressure in the west-central Atlantic at 1200 UTC 23 April 2024.
GOES-East Sea Spray RGB imagery identified sea spray, first in the southern quadrant of the low pressure before shifting to the eastern quadrant from ~1200 UTC to 1630 UTC 23 April 2024. Sea spray is indicated by the mid-cyan color, which evolves into cloud streets downstream (bright white colors).
GOES-East Airmass RGB imagery between 1200 UTC and 1800 UTC 23 April 2024 showed the system strengthening as the extratropical cyclone was in an environment with high levels of potential vorticity, indicated by the dark red and orange colors. The associated cold front can also be seen pushing to the east.
GOES-East GeoColor during the same timeframe also provided an evolution of the intensifying low pressure with the circulation easily visible.
OPC Surface Analysis on 1800 UTC 23 April 2024 showed a storm-force low with a minimum central pressure of 995 mb in the western-central Atlantic.
GOES-East Proxyvis captured low-level cloud features in the North Atlantic on 08 April 2024. Proxyvis mimics visible imagery at night by combining several infrared (IR) bands and is available for the GOES-East, GOES-West, Himawari-9, and Meteosat-9/10 satellites. Low-level cloud features at night over the ocean can be easier to track using Proxyvis rather than traditional IR imagery.
The West Atlantic 24 Hour Surface Forecast issued by the Ocean Prediction Center on 07 April 2024 indicated the potential for fog south of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on the northern and western flanks of a gale-force storm system at 0000 UTC 08 April 2024.
The GOES-East Nighttime Microphysics RGB confirmed that from 0000 UTC to 0450 UTC 08 April 2024, an area of low-level clouds and fog persisted south of Newfoundland, indicated by the dull aqua-gray colors and nearly stationary cloud features.
The GOES-East Proxyvis also showed the stagnant low-level cloud features over the ocean (in the blue circled area), with a grayscale color bar that mimics daytime visible imagery. Two cold fronts to the southeast of the low pressure are also seen pushing east into the Central Atlantic waters.
Meanwhile, the low-level cloud features are much more difficult to detect when using the traditional GOES-East Clean Longwave Window IR channel, as low-level clouds look to be mostly identical with the same gray color.
The JPSS/VIIRS Nighttime Microphysics RGB showed the low level clouds persisting on the northwest flank as the extratropical cyclone pulled away from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland around 0600 UTC 08 April 2024.
Figure 5: 08 April 2024 JPSS/VIIRS Nighttime Microphysics RGB shows low clouds persisting on the extratropical cyclone’s northern and western flanks around 0600 UTC. Credit: CIRA Slider
GOES-East, GOES-West, Himawari-9, and Meteosat-9/10 Proxyvis are now all available in AWIPS-II workstations at OPC.
Chris Smith, CISESS GOES-R Satellite Liaison for NWS WPC/OPC
A total solar eclipse took place across North America on 8 April 2024, and was visible from western Mexico, through the south-central and northeastern US, and into far eastern Canada. NOAA GOES and JPSS satellites captured imagery of the total eclipse from above. This blog post will share a variety of GOES ABI and JPSS VIIRS Imagery revealing unique views of the eclipse.
Starting off with Full Disk Imagery from GOES-18 (-West), visible imagery shows the eclipse appear out of the terminator well south of the equator, racing northeast across North America thereafter (Fig 1).
From the GOES-16 (-East) perspective, the eclipse emerges into the western part of the disk view just south of the equator around 1630 UTC and traverses northeast across North America and east into the terminator by 2000 UTC (Fig 2).
Focusing on the Contiguous United States (CONUS), the GOES-East CONUS sector provided a great view of the eclipse through the day at 5-minute intervals. Visible imagery shows totality entering south Texas by 1830 UTC, and exiting Maine about an hour later (Fig 3).
A similar view from the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB provides additional qualitative detail about the clouds across the path of totality, including low (liquid) clouds as cyan vs upper (ice) clouds as red (Fig 4).
Focusing on times shortly before, and shortly after, the passage of the eclipse over east Texas, it is obvious that the loss of solar heating during the short period of the eclipse resulted in a collapse of the cu field (Fig 5).
The NWS and NESDIS collaborated on a Mesoscale plan for the eclipse. GOES-East Meso-1 followed the path of totality, updating it’s position every 5-minutes, providing 1-min imagery of the eclipse totality progression across North America (Fig 6).
GOES-East Meso-2, and GOES-West Meso’s -1 and -2, were lined up along a portion of totality from Mexico through the Ohio River Valley (Fig 7).
One can overlay GOES-East Meso-1 onto GOES-East CONUS Imagery in order to follow the eclipse in 1-min intervals, while maintaining imagery outside of the Meso sector (Fig 8)
A similar animation can be made, but from a totality-relative perspective (Fig 9).
Focusing back on the clouds around Dallas, viewing 1-min Nighttime Microphysics RGB imagery captures the cloud field within totality as if it were nighttime. This imagery overlaid on the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB CONUS imagery (Fig 10) shows the rapid transition from daylight (and the daytime RGB imagery) and nighttime (and the nighttime RGB imagery).
The appearance of all 16 GOES-East ABI bands over Texas totality is shared in Fig 11.
Thunderstorms were already well underway over east Texas as the eclipse passed to the northwest, allowing for a unique view in GOES-West 1-min VIS/IR Sandwich Imagery (Fig 12).
While orbital paths of NOAA-21 and S-NPP did not align with the eclipse path of totality, that of NOAA-20 did, capturing the eclipse in the western half of the swath. VIIRS provides a unique ~overhead view of the eclipse at 375-m and 750-m spatial resolution. The 22 VIIRS bands are shown in Fig 13.
Additional NOAA-20 VIIRS RGB Imagery products are shown in Figs 14-16.
Gusty winds across the northern AK coast in late March 2024 resulted in widespread blowing snow. Early on 27 March, NWS Fairbanks, AK included the following in their forecast: “East of Deadhorse towards Point Thompson and Barter Island, winds will increase this afternoon gusting to 55 mph at times with blowing snow and blizzard conditions tonight into early tomorrow morning before weakening thereafter.” and later: “East winds continue to gust to 40 to 55 mph causing blowing snow with low visibility over the Western Arctic Coast through Thursday morning.”
A recently developed Blowing Snow RGB isolates blowing snow in both ABI and VIIRS imagery. At such a high latitude, GOES-18 imagery pixel size is quite large, but the blowing snow signature is still present in the imagery, albeit without much spatial detail (Fig 1). In the imagery, clear sky snow covered surface is red, clouds are cyan and blue, and blowing snow is green/yellow. Blowing snow is diagnosed along and just south of the north coast from the Canadian border west to around PAQT.
VIIRS imagery from the three JPSS satellites (SNPP, NOAA-20, NOAA-21) provided 13 375-m resolution Blowing Snow RGB images over the region during the day on the 27th (Fig 2). These images significantly enhance the visualization of the blowing snow, highlighting individual HCRs with precision and providing a distinct contrast between areas affected by blowing snow and those that are not. One can use the imagery from ABI and VIIRS to confirm blowing snow as the source of a visibility reduction at surface weather stations and webcams, and detect the presence of blowing snow and track its evolution between weather stations and webcams.
A comparison between the VIIRS and ABI imagery at 2330 UTC is shown in Fig 3. Surface obs overlaid in this figure indicate zero visibility at PAAD, and reductions further west as well.
Webcam views at Deadhorse (PASC) also confirm the presence of blowing snow and considerably reduced visibility (Fig 4). Further west at Nuiqsut (PAQT), where the blowing snow signature was noticeably weaker in the satellite imagery, visibility reduction is present but not as extreme (Fig 5).
The Blowing Snow RGB can be installed in AWIPS, and can be accessed on CIRA SLIDER. VIIRS and ABI.