By the morning of 10 October 2018, Hurricane Michael was a category 4 storm set to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle coast later in the day. GOES-16 had been providing 1-min satellite imagery over the storm during the days leading up to landfall, and collected 30-second imagery of the storm on the 10th to help support operations.

The VIS/IR sandwich product has been discussed in previous blog posts, and involves combining visible and IR imagery into one display to take advantage of both. The VIS provides high spatial detail, while the IR provides the quantitative brightness temperature information. In the past in AWIPS, users would overlay semi-transparent IR on the VIS to make this product. Recently, the OPG in collaboration with NWS created an RGB that combines the VIS and IR imagery into one. This allows for the high spatial detail of the VIS to show within the IR information noticeably better. The RGB is currently being tested in a few offices and tweaked to best fulfill forecasters needs.

Below is 40 minutes of 30-sec VIS/IR Sandwich RGB imagery over Hurricane Michael (Fig 1) on the 10th, along with corresponding VIS (Fig 2) and IR (Fig 3) imagery.

Zoomed in view on Hurricane Michael center of circulation just prior to landfall (Fig 4).

GOES-16 Derived Motion Winds (DMW’s) were available every 2.5 minutes within the 30-sec meso sector (Fig 5). As one would expect, most of the winds were in the upper levels (0-250 mb = pink). Low level winds (blue) were computed around the outside of the storm.

A daylong animation of the storm, including landfall, from GOES-16 5-min CONUS imagery (Fig 5). Note the eye holds together pretty well after landfall before filling in towards sundown.

Bill Line, NWS