Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:28:10
Unknown
welcome to today’s visit Satellite chat. First I wanted to update, folks on, some of the newer things that, have recently come out of visit. So I just wanted to highlight a couple of those things. Before we really begin here. So if you go to the, visit home page, one of the things that you’ll see recently from the visit, calendar is these, tropical cyclone sessions that were led by NHC.

00:00:28:13 – 00:00:52:06
Unknown
So these are updated, they’ve been updated yearly now in the past, 4 or 5 years now. And basically what they look at is, model upgrades and also they, they look back at last year’s season and kind of see, how they’ve been, doing in terms of the statistics with the models, how they’re doing. So those are both recorded and they’re available on the student guide.

00:00:52:06 – 00:01:28:12
Unknown
So if you, you can get to it a few different ways, but from here you can just simply click on the, student guide and that’ll take you, to the recording, which is, right here where that web based video is. So, so I encourage you to check out that recording, at your leisure. And then the other thing to note is, if you go to the blog site entry here on the visit page, you can see a number of the, blogs that are satellite related, including The Sims, Satellite blog and, just an entry I want to make you aware of is the, visit blog here as well.

00:01:28:24 – 00:01:57:07
Unknown
Because just recently, just last week, I put together, a few different blog entries for the one minute imagery that was available during the go the goes 14 espresso hour period, which is essentially one minute imagery that was able to run for extended periods. And and on the blog, you’ll see, entries for a few different days on here, that were of interest, in terms of some severe thunderstorms.

00:01:57:09 – 00:02:23:02
Unknown
And, the, the one that I just put together last week is, a video where you just click on it and it’ll take you to, YouTube, link here. And, when you have sufficient volume going here, you’ll just hear me, narrating this here. So it’s kind of interesting. Good, good exercises to go through, good applications of the, one minute imagery that’s available.

00:02:23:02 – 00:02:48:24
Unknown
So I can’t really show one minute imagery that well over, over our go to meeting here. So that’s why I’m kind of advertising it here. So you can go and check these out on your own time here. Okay. Let’s go on to a recent event that occurred, recently, but back on, 9th July here. What what we’re looking at here is a visible loop over Nebraska.

00:02:48:27 – 00:03:17:06
Unknown
And the storm of interest impacted North Platte, which is kind of the the storm in the center of the screen, right here where my, cursor is. And I had, baseball sized hail over North Platte and in vicinity of North Platte. So it was of interest because, one of the things that was, made aware to us here is, an experimental product that, sims that Wisconsin, the probability of, severe product or.

00:03:17:09 – 00:03:41:18
Unknown
Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s here. I’m seeing a little white spot up in the upper right, and it might be part of your go to me. Okay, I’ll move that over. There. Gone. Now. It’s. There it is. Okay. Thanks. Okay. This is the the probability of severe product or also known as prob severe product from Sims, in Wisconsin.

00:03:41:21 – 00:04:05:06
Unknown
And, basically it’s an experimental product. It was looked at quite a bit during the, hazardous weather testbed at the spring experiment, down at SPC this spring. And a lot of forecasters, there that were evaluating light liked it here. And, basically what it does is it takes input from, radar as well as satellite and also uses some model output as well.

00:04:05:09 – 00:04:30:10
Unknown
So has three different inputs. And you can see those listed here. Basically the bottom line here is the, the mesh from the MRM as here, was estimating hail. And in the nickel size range here, it’s given here, basically predicting nickel size hail. And like I said, we have baseballs, quite a bit, in the North Platte area.

00:04:30:12 – 00:04:54:12
Unknown
And, what we think is most likely the cause here is this is, most likely an LP storm. There was some storm chaser, video of this, and it was very much an LP, storm here. So it didn’t have a whole lot in terms of, reflectivity with it here. So. So it may be the reason why our, mesh, estimated hail estimates are on the low side here.

00:04:54:19 – 00:05:14:04
Unknown
Now, with the positive news. If we look at the satellite input here, it’s the two lines on the bottom. They look at the normal normalized vertical growth rate and also the glaciation rate. In this particular case, they were strong. So so it actually bumped it up, so to speak, in terms of the probability of this, being severe.

00:05:14:04 – 00:05:38:07
Unknown
And if we go back to our visible loop, we can kind of see why with this particular storm, it, it initiates, with explosive growth, growth here in the North Platte area. And it can also see the anvil cirrus really spreading off towards the southeast quite rapidly. We’re in northwest flow on this particular day aloft. So the storm is moving pretty much towards the, south here.

00:05:38:12 – 00:06:08:23
Unknown
But the thing that struck me is how much? Further to the south, the anvil cirrus on this storm extended compared to the other storms further off to the east, or even the storms off in, Colorado here. So it was kind of an interesting event to look at. And, like I said, it was kind of, pretty well, handled here by this, probability, severe product, new experimental product that, like I said, takes into account, multiple, sensors here.

00:06:08:25 – 00:06:23:20
Unknown
So next I am going to turn it over to Scott Brockmire at Sims. And I will make you the presenter. Scott.

00:06:23:22 – 00:06:57:22
Unknown
I’m wondering if maybe the screen pulls from severe. Should we ask? You know, I don’t see my old pop up prompt yet. There we go. Show my screen. All right, so hopefully you should see it up on the screen. Yes, I’m seeing it now. You need me to make it smaller or larger, or is that okay?

00:06:57:22 – 00:07:04:21
Unknown
As is it looks good. Okay.

00:07:04:24 – 00:07:42:16
Unknown
I suppose a popular topic of what’s happening, currently is, all the fires happening up in Canada. And in terms of trying to detect the hotspots of where they actually are using a sure way by our channel, it’s extremely important if you want to get a handle on the exact, you know, exact part of a county or how hot is this hotspot, you get more accurate info if you use higher spatial resolution.

00:07:42:18 – 00:08:15:23
Unknown
So what I’m going to do is a comparison of a one kilometer Earth, from the first instrument, which is a polar orbiter, and compare that with it. So that goes which is, four kilometer over the equator. But after having a look up at camp over here with a large viewing angle, it’s probably almost an eight kilometer to pixel.

00:08:15:26 – 00:08:57:20
Unknown
So I’m going to toggle here. You see, there’s a lot of hotspots here which you have spent over a past year. Hotter temperatures and this yellow to red. So we see and it says the British Columbia and it says Alberta, Canada. So we’ve got a lot of hotspots here and we can see extremely fine detail and extremely hot temperatures with a lot of.

00:08:57:22 – 00:09:32:17
Unknown
Fires. So here’s a one kilometer. And then here’s what we get from that goes why is that not in the window. All right. Here’s one problem we have. We are localized to goes east. So we’ve got a line here which you know, everything on this side of the line is from goes east. And everything I say the line is, goes over the other ocean.

00:09:32:17 – 00:10:20:17
Unknown
So, if I toggle it, I mean, these hotspots here that I’m holding my cursor over the ones in British Columbia, it’s obvious that you know, where you, if you compare what we see on it, goes to what we see, but it veers, you get finer detail and often hotter temperatures. If you get a readout. So on this one here, you know, we get the hottest at this hotspot, for 20 years or is on a year.

00:10:21:29 – 00:10:32:21
Unknown
Know we get some in the mid 40s or to be some hotter ones in there, it’s hard to get back.

00:10:32:23 – 00:11:08:25
Unknown
Yeah. So know we get much hotter temperatures and we can see the, you get a more accurate idea of the location because you’re not having such a large, problem with a viewing angle. So we encourage officers to try and get, through the LDM this high resolution, you know, stuff that is extremely helpful.

00:11:08:28 – 00:11:32:00
Unknown
Scott, I have a question. Because, when you put the various imagery and you get the fullest resolution, or is it like one for is it one byte because. Yeah, well, if they’re really hot, you can see, say up to, you know, above 400 K, which would be about at least 127 C. So yeah. And it we can’t handle that.

00:11:32:05 – 00:11:52:27
Unknown
Okay. So if it gets to an area that’s extremely hot it just shows in the Mo data. So maybe when I saw you doing a few no datas. Yeah. In fact I thought I had said I’ll be one of the air. And I do know with the regular goes because it is put in as one byte, it saturates it.

00:11:54:00 – 00:12:02:15
Unknown
But 330 K. So that would be.

00:12:02:18 – 00:12:09:27
Unknown
About four. So that would be 60.

00:12:09:29 – 00:12:39:11
Unknown
Yeah. So if you have, a really hot pixel, you won’t be able to tell how hot it is because it’s gone over the edge, over the edge of it. And so it just says no data. So that’s where your hospitals are, but at least you get a general idea of, of the overall pattern. And, and at time.

00:12:39:22 – 00:13:01:28
Unknown
Yeah. You can see wow where the hot spots are spreading out. And so, you know, the, the overall, the overall idea here is that it’s extremely important for higher spatial resolution.

00:13:02:01 – 00:13:34:02
Unknown
I guess that’s all I wanted to that was the only thing that I had, was what I was saying was, you know, I, I think now, if you want to talk about how to detect the smoke. Okay. And, I’m going to show mostly, Dan, if you want to. Change my screen. Let’s make sure I get the right one.

00:13:34:05 – 00:14:03:21
Unknown
Okay. Is everybody seeing it? Yeah. Yep. Okay. This is actually from this morning. I don’t have the website. It’s on my local system here, so we’ll do use rams this and I’ll try and here loop through it. But you can actually see a little bit from last night. And then this is that goes with satellite. So earlier in the day we have really good viewing angles to look at the scattering from the smoke particles and some of the smoke even up.

00:14:03:21 – 00:14:28:15
Unknown
And northern Montana here in the western part is pretty dense. So it’s actually heading down. So Scott showed some really hot fires and we, I noticed yesterday in, Oregon, in southeast Oregon, and you can actually see a little bit where my cursor is, you can see this little bit of a, plume here and that, I guess it’s mixed grassland then.

00:14:28:15 – 00:14:55:23
Unknown
Forest fire. I hadn’t looked up all the details on it. And here we can see another one in, Idaho. And then with this morning, we see a longer line of smoke. Some of that is local, and some of that is being brought in from further up north in Canada. But, one of the other events, so, okay, one of the other things is, let’s see, it must have been July 1st for us.

00:14:55:25 – 00:15:25:12
Unknown
And I came in to the office and we it’s been really hazy here, but the haze that morning looked reddish with the sunrise. So I was like, is there any smoke around? And I could show you this? And it’s right at, and this was from that morning, and I’ll start looping this as well. And now we’re early in the day here.

00:15:25:12 – 00:16:02:19
Unknown
You see this really milky area and, spilling across the, Nebraska there and up into Wyoming. And the edge of it is clipping northeast Colorado. And we’re right here and the northeast part up against the mountains. And so, when I looked here, I was like, I wonder where that’s coming from. I guess it’s coming from up in Canada, but I also know there’s, I checked on the NOAA site, tell it, see if they split to the NOAA nation, and here we can, actually look, it’s the air quality.

00:16:02:19 – 00:16:41:25
Unknown
So you are probably familiar with it, but, and you can see vertical smoke integration and surface smoke, and these guys do a pretty good job. But I guess when I click on that it doesn’t. Oh, that’s right, you have to go here. So we can see actual values of the concentration. But the other thing I noticed before I actually went to the site was I looked at the, East Goes East, which is shown here for the previous day on June 30th, and I’ll start playing this as well.

00:16:41:28 – 00:17:02:17
Unknown
And I was looking up in this area to see what the leading edge of this, trough was. If it was bringing down any, smoke with it and died at the end of the day, you can see it. This is goes east, so goes east is like at 60 west. So when the sun sets, it’s at a very long angle.

00:17:02:17 – 00:17:26:27
Unknown
And the parallel scattering in the beam is the greatest at that time of day. So we can see it looks milky at the bottom edge of that. The end of the day. But the other thing I noticed here in the Gulf was that it was also looking pretty milky. There’s this little ring here near the end of the day, and I was curious about what that was.

00:17:27:00 – 00:18:01:02
Unknown
And because when I stopped and I looked at the hazard map thing, for that particular day and see, it would be this one, I don’t this is the let me see, this one is actually July 1st. I don’t see any smoke in the southeast. So I was initially thinking, oh, is that just hey, and then you can see from this that there are at that time there were extensive fires up in Canada and a lot of the smoke, but smoke was in fact making it down.

00:18:01:02 – 00:18:32:21
Unknown
Can’t look what. I just need to go back. And this was the previous day, so we had some, fires down in New Mexico and, Arizona as well. That was contributing, but more across the south. So when I looked at the text product they actually mentioned in the text product, which I found on their website, here, hazard mapping system, fire and smoke product.

00:18:32:21 – 00:19:11:13
Unknown
And it’s a text product we can look at. And for that particular day, they actually did mention, Gulf of Mexico dust. Actually, this is for today. They’re actually seeing some more. I didn’t look at it today, but this is what I saw for that day. And so, the last little loop I’m going to show is what it did was I yeah, we had a session the previous week and we were looking out into the Atlantic, and there was actually a pretty big dust event which is being captured by this dust.

00:19:11:13 – 00:19:48:04
Unknown
RGV and here you can see it coming off the coast of Africa. It has a little bit of diurnal mess with it, but it’s this darker pink and this is the beginning of it. And then it moves across the Caribbean and up into the Gulf. So this is one of those cases where you need, well, in this case, the air quality experts were tracking this and helping to identify what was the difference between the dust and where it was coming from, for the smoke and where it was coming from, as well as what was this other feature that can look similar to dust in the visible imagery and where was it coming from?

00:19:48:07 – 00:20:22:08
Unknown
So, this, is one of the RGB products that we likely will create with when we have all the channels that are available from those are in the future, we can create something like this from the polar orbiting satellites, using available channels, in particular Viirs or modus. But I didn’t get around to doing it for, for, well, for the dust, actually, I did look at it for when it was over the southeast U.S, but it wasn’t really showing a strong signal.

00:20:22:10 – 00:20:48:18
Unknown
So this is when the signal is more stronger. In this case, the blue is low level moisture that dust is indicating. I mean, the pink is indicating the dust. The dark red is indicating, high level, clouds, and the yellow is indicating, medium or low level clouds. So with that, that’s about all I have for for this.

00:20:48:18 – 00:21:00:23
Unknown
If anybody wants to see anything in particular, I could show that. Or if they have any questions.

00:21:00:26 – 00:21:17:24
Unknown
One other thing I just thought of this morning that they didn’t actually grab the sea. Scott, did you look at any of the day night band? Because they know we have a full moon out there, and that might be a better way of helping them get some of the smoke at nighttime, especially if that’s going to be affecting your area.

00:21:17:26 – 00:21:22:20
Unknown
Anyone? A little bit of a heads up. Yeah.

00:21:22:22 – 00:21:34:19
Unknown
And let me see that. I need to go back to babe A and I wonder.

00:21:34:22 – 00:21:48:12
Unknown
Just quickly called up here. I had not had a look at it currently, but. Look at Alaska history.

00:21:48:14 – 00:21:59:02
Unknown
If they see something interesting, you know, say if you pass control over.

00:21:59:04 – 00:22:40:19
Unknown
In. Sorry for using the Rams online. But, one nice feature about this is that it’s scalable right now and it works. Mobile devices okay. Yeah I’ve got if you want to pass control back over to me okay. We use the day night band. Play bears instrument. Stop the little bit care stuff the madness, and we’ll look at what we’ve got currently from this morning.

00:22:40:22 – 00:22:59:12
Unknown
Okay, so say A7 chair is probably a good image. Oh, look at the time. The bottom. It’s almost 11.

00:22:59:14 – 00:23:42:26
Unknown
Days. So I imagine that this area, it’s still not so daylight, but if you use the day night band, we can see very good detail and know a lot of this. Spoke with us about that. So back into this area. It’s a way to. Ask well what does this toggle between day and night band. And it’s visible just if you get it at band music a day night band at squeeze.

00:23:42:28 – 00:23:48:05
Unknown
All right. So.

00:23:48:08 – 00:23:56:06
Unknown
Why do I not get any input at all?

00:23:56:09 – 00:24:04:20
Unknown
If I didn’t go ask. Confused?

00:24:04:22 – 00:24:34:10
Unknown
Oh, well. Well, if this were a case where this area did not have any daylight, because we have a full moon, you can see a lot of the smoke here. Even during the nighttime hours, that you would not, you know, you would not be able to see any hint of this on any of the air, any of the air channels.

00:24:34:26 – 00:24:51:29
Unknown
So this is a handy channel for the night band, to also help to look for problems. It in the overnight hours.

00:24:52:01 – 00:25:04:00
Unknown
If it’s got, it’s got, What what are these, ways, off on the side over here that are, northwest to southeast, oriented?

00:25:04:02 – 00:25:34:16
Unknown
I, here, off on the side, look towards the limb, like, over on the stripes. Yeah. What are those stripes? Okay, I should know that, but I don’t. It’s it’s an artifact of the, of the day night band, detectors on the edges. You see a straight penis, and this does not show up on the other channels, but we always have that on the edges.

00:25:34:16 – 00:26:00:03
Unknown
And so, yeah, you just have to try and ignore them and just, you know. If you’re on the edges, it does make things look a little bit strange. Okay. Yeah, I think I heard at some point, the explanation, I can’t remember either. But let’s go to Great Falls now. Great Falls, you have any questions or comments?

00:26:00:06 – 00:26:39:08
Unknown
No, I was just curious because I know it. It looks like you’re going to discuss, dust and smoke products, and I just want to see if there was anything that, I could learn from your presentations today. Okay. What are some of your, your favorite products, so to speak, to, to look at that. Well, I looked at several that we, we get a feed from the, sport group, and I was looking at the day and age stuff, and there was just too much ruined, for most of our images overnight, and, I really wasn’t able to pick out anything that really that we get in with, that,

00:26:39:10 – 00:26:53:24
Unknown
really would help us in tracking that is, you know, actually, the visible satellite as the sun was coming up this morning was one of the better, ways of showing the extent of it.

00:26:53:27 – 00:27:25:11
Unknown
So I think. Yeah, that’s actually good to hear. I mean, it’s a it’s a good, check. And do you utilize that site? I think they put out use of their quality, but I know there’s a whole bunch of them. Let me stay on picture. Are you talking to me? Yeah. Yes. Yes, yes. No, I and, I looked at that site when I saw the link that you presented up there and I thought, well, I’ll just take a look at that.

00:27:25:14 – 00:27:52:09
Unknown
I, I had looked at some of the, there was another site that I looked at for, I think it was an EPA site that, was forecasting smoke movement, and they probably are that similar databases. And it showed a little bit of the smoke moving into the north central part of Montana, but, probably not as much as we would expect it to based upon the flow.

00:27:52:12 – 00:28:18:11
Unknown
But then again, I don’t know what they’re using for concentrations and so on. Right. Yeah. And, yeah, I found that there’s a couple different sites, so it’s obviously not a super easy, solution either. Well, and then we also looked at OBS this morning just to see across Alberta what was going on at the surface. And we had to go all the way to the northern part of Alberta just seeing visibility restrictions at the airport.

00:28:18:13 – 00:28:38:00
Unknown
Oh, that must be, you know, I was looking at higher ups and so on to kind of get an idea where the smoke layer might be. And it looks like, you know, just based upon what’s going on, what the surface OBS are showing it, that over most of Alberta, it must be aloft and it’s not really affecting surface.

00:28:42:09 – 00:29:08:14
Unknown
Yeah. So are you able to see Northwest Territories that you’re in the extreme part of northern part of Alberta, that you’re seeing that, visibility restrictions at the surface? Yeah. Okay. Although with the with, actually sometimes down here, I’m trying to think, yeah, we weren’t really noticing any respiratory stuff. There were any warnings like that.

00:29:08:14 – 00:29:30:27
Unknown
So. Yeah. Yeah, it was more people asking about it. Yeah. You know, I looked at some of the air quality sites, even in Montana, west of the divide that, may have been showing some of the PM 25 concentrations and everything so far is still flat. So, it that must not be affecting even the surface in Montana yet either.

00:29:32:27 – 00:29:39:16
Unknown
Well, that’s I guess a good thing. Yeah.

00:29:39:18 – 00:29:45:24
Unknown
Okay. Well any other questions or comments.

00:29:45:27 – 00:29:53:17
Unknown
Okay. Well thanks everybody. And thank you very falls for attending today’s visit satellite chat and have a great day. You too. Thank you.