Satellite Liaison Blog

During the past 24 hours, we have had the special privilege to ingest 1-min satellite data from GOES-14 as part of a Super Rapid Scan Operations for GOES-R (SRSOR) demonstration.  The emphasis has been on the thunderstorm complexes that developed over the Upper Midwest on Wednesday afternoon and moved towards the Mid-Atlantic.  I have put together two animations below with two different lightning product overlaid to shows the difference between cloud-to-ground strikes and cloud-to-ground density plots.

GOES-14 SRSOR overlaid with the GLD-360 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes (click on image to animate).

GOES-14 SRSOR overlaid with the 2-min GLD-360 Lightning Density (click on image to animate).

Notice how the lightning density provides more information on the intensity of the updrafts, while that signal gets flooded out by all the pluses and minuses in the previous image.  Although having the SRSOR is a special, temporary privilege, GOES-R will allow for this as part of a regular routine.  When you couple high resolution (temporal and spatial) satellite imagery with the high temporal resolution of lightning data, forecasters will be able to gain an edge on severe weather forecasting.  This could assist in earlier warnings and less false alarms in the future.

I will try to post more examples of today’s severe weather tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!