Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:02:05
Speaker 1
Joined us from Norman as well.

00:00:02:07 – 00:00:02:24
Speaker 2
That’s correct.

00:00:02:26 – 00:00:28:15
Speaker 1
Okay, great. Welcome to today’s, visit satellite chat. We’ll we’ll talk briefly about, very significant event that happened outside of Conus here. And then we’ll get back to some of events. So we’ll start off with the, supertyphoon, an which occurred back, around the 7th of November. And, this is a VRS image that was taken on the seventh at 1619 Z.

00:00:28:17 – 00:00:57:27
Speaker 1
And, Dan Lindsay put this, together here, and it got, 19,000 hits on, Facebook between, various, sharing on social media. So it got a lot of attention, a very wonderful looking, picture here in terms of just how intense this gets. And, and I talked to some of our tropical cyclone, experts here at, Sierra, and they said this is as intense of a satellite signature of a tropical cyclone as they’ve ever seen.

00:00:57:27 – 00:01:20:11
Speaker 1
It had, Dvorak, rating of T eight, which is as high as it goes. And, one one downfall when it gets that high is is a very small sample size to look at. So, so the idea to get a accurate, intensity estimate from Dvorak is, is a concern because you have such a small statistical sample size to draw from.

00:01:20:11 – 00:01:47:03
Speaker 1
So that was one of the interesting, facets of this, storm here as well. Let me go on to, another, blog that was, put together by, Mike Fulmer on the Goes-r and National Center’s, perspective. What I’m going to do is click on this loop and hopefully everybody sees it here. This is the, experimental.

00:01:47:03 – 00:01:59:04
Speaker 1
Oops. Let me go back to the looping imagery here. It’s this one right here.

00:01:59:06 – 00:02:29:12
Speaker 1
And on this particular one, this is the, experimental lightning strike density data that is, available and, interesting thing about this is it had a spike and, the lightning strike density here, just as it was about to make, landfall. And, some hypotheses in terms of why that was, there. But it looks like it’s a good research topic in terms of, trying to address some of the questions associated with that.

00:02:29:12 – 00:02:56:04
Speaker 1
But anyway, another interesting, facet of this, this very powerful super typhoon here as it approached the, Philippines and then another, interesting perspective here. This was a loop that just shows the, the light from, the, veers imagery here. And you can see the lights with the day night band here.

00:02:56:06 – 00:03:21:20
Speaker 1
And, it shows before and after Haiyan hit here. And the idea is that you can see, particularly in this area around Tacloban, where it where it made landfall, the areas that were impacted and, where the power went out for, such a large area around here. So that’s a good use of the, the veers day night band here in terms of assessing where the power outages occurred, just after the storm here.

00:03:21:20 – 00:03:51:06
Speaker 1
So very interesting, imagery to look at. There’s a lot to look at. So, like I said, there’s, the various blogs out here, this one that I just, showed was, put together. Mike Fulmer has, a lot of good imagery on here. And then also, this is the the Sierra. Let me just go ahead and go to the top here.

00:03:51:06 – 00:04:15:17
Speaker 1
This is the, Sierra, viewers imagery and visualization team blog. So you can see some additional imagery here as well, put together by Kermit, gorgeous semen, and also the Sims satellite blog as well. Has a nice, loop in there. And I don’t know if John or Scott will, show some additional imagery or not, but, some all good blogs to look at here for additional imagery on this.

00:04:15:27 – 00:04:38:06
Speaker 1
Okay. So what I’m going to do next here is turn it over to, Scott Lindstrom at, Simms. So let me make him the presenter here.

00:04:38:09 – 00:04:59:29
Speaker 2
So you’re seeing my screen. I hope that I’ve just been looking in Europe. There. Apparently, there’s been a big cyclone that’s moved over Sardinia, killing at least 17 people. My daughter’s in the south of France, and they had sleet. So. But that’s not. I was just looking at this as Dan was talking, but, I wanted to talk a little bit about the recent event in the Midwest.

00:05:00:08 – 00:05:27:19
Speaker 2
This is a percent of normal, GW from Sunday morning, 1750. And you see the, the nice swath of 200% of normal over, over the Ohio Valley, Mississippi Valley, Great Lakes. So the storm that was affecting us was, I guess, large and long lasting enough that it was able to draw north a whole bunch of moisture.

00:05:27:28 – 00:05:54:09
Speaker 2
So dew points into the 60s, all the way up into, Wisconsin. I think Janesville got to a 62 point, so plenty of moisture associated with this. If you look at the go sounder, I’m just going to put a little put a little notice that there you see some holes there still, there’s still some issues with the go sounder that there’s, the filter wheel is spinning not at a constant rate.

00:05:54:09 – 00:06:16:23
Speaker 2
So it’s, you’re ending up with these missing data points. The the number of data points is decreasing with time. So I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but in between the clouds here, you do see some, lifted indices, greater than mine at or at lifting indices with a magnitude greater than minus five. So plenty of instability.

00:06:18:13 – 00:06:42:01
Speaker 2
I don’t have it here, but Valparaiso University took an experimental, sounding at 1859 C that was just incredibly unstable with, 89 winds at 600 millibars. So just a whole lot of, energy for this system to work with. I’m just going to show you the regular goes right now. This is it just goes wasn’t so.

00:06:42:01 – 00:06:45:08
Speaker 2
So we have.

00:06:45:11 – 00:07:17:13
Speaker 2
We have, imagery more frequently than every 15 minutes. These storms weren’t particularly high, so they did not have particularly cold tops, kind of what you might expect. Given that it’s mid-November, the tropopause isn’t that high after all, in the, in the Midwest in mid November. But you do see some if you pay attention to this, as you see the storms going up, you do see plenty of enhanced V signatures associated with these, storms as they develop in Illinois.

00:07:17:15 – 00:07:44:23
Speaker 2
So I’ll just let this go a couple more times than I do. Like at the very end up here in Wisconsin, you can just see the the great shear that’s associated with the system, because the clouds at different levels are moving at such different speeds and velocities and from different directions. So what are you showing right now? Because I say because or I’m showing you goes 13 imager data, enhanced infrared imagery.

00:07:44:25 – 00:08:15:11
Speaker 2
Yeah. It looks like you haven’t caught up yet. Jeff. Yeah, I’m it’s usually about 45 seconds behind what you’re talking about. Okay. I know there’s not much you can do about it, but just, it’s occasionally showing signs of life. Okay, well, I’m going to go to something different right now. So that’ll probably be about the time that you see the imager, but I’m going to show you a toggle between the different channels on from viewers.

00:08:15:26 – 00:08:44:00
Speaker 2
For this particular storm. So I’m showing you the visible imagery, the 11.45 imagery and the 1.61 reflectivity. I really like the 1.61 because it is, it’s a little it absorbs, the ice clouds are not that reflective at 1.61. And it really shows the cirrus, the tops of the cirrus very nicely. You see the overshooting tops jump out very nicely.

00:08:44:03 – 00:09:11:01
Speaker 2
They don’t show up that well in the visible, in this particular time because it’s near high noon. There’s a lot of reflected light and there’s not a lot of contrast. This is after the storms have moved in into Indiana. So there’s a particularly strong one with a nice overshooting top, it looks like near West Lafayette, and some others that are up from South Bend northeastward into Lower Michigan.

00:09:11:09 – 00:09:39:04
Speaker 2
So it does show kind of the broken nature of the line of storms coming from. So some of them were fairly long lived. But there weren’t there wasn’t one long squall line. It was more, discrete individual cells all along the so-called squall line, but, really nice severe imagery. And, and again, I’ll put in a plug for the 1.61 to help you really see what’s going on on the cirrus in the cirrus, because it’s, you get a lot more contrast.

00:09:40:08 – 00:10:05:18
Speaker 2
Boy, we need, this is show Brook. We need to ship this down to Storm Prediction Center and make sure they’re looking at some of this to. Okay, that’s pretty impressive. Can you stop it on the. Alas, no. This is an animated GIF that I have. I know, right, I don’t have the I don’t have the individual saw the street the street is a streaky nature around Saint Louis.

00:10:05:18 – 00:10:30:13
Speaker 2
The priest the the tracks of the cells. And so you got wet ground. Dry ground. That’s exactly what that is. Yes. Okay. That’s a good observation to see. See, what’s interesting is this is in the 1.61. No. Yeah. What’s interesting is because my it’s so slow it’s not actually looping. So it actually stays on it. And I can study it for a while.

00:10:30:16 – 00:10:50:14
Speaker 2
So hard for you to see. So yep. The high resolution of the veers or the mode. So you’re looking at the 11.45 does give you you do see the thermal structure where the ground is wet and the ground is straight has a different temperature. So, so I, I guess this is Bernie. That was going to be my question.

00:10:50:14 – 00:11:14:12
Speaker 2
Is it the ground or does occasionally I see it and you might think you would see a little bit of that signature in the viz because we tend to see that out west too. But, you know, in terms of if it’s that wet where it’s changing the temperature, I mean, is it solely that or is it also moisture above the surface that straight?

00:11:14:14 – 00:11:39:02
Speaker 2
I know it’s it’s on the ground. Yeah. But it isn’t here. It’s not showing up in the surface. It’s not showing up in the visible or in the 1.61. It’s just showing up in the thermal. Yeah. Because occasionally out west and maybe it’s because our soils are a little different, but when we have it where it rains enough to influence the temperature of the infrared, we often see this trickiness in the at least that goes visible.

00:11:39:02 – 00:12:10:08
Speaker 2
And then we can see some transcripts. I’ve looked at it that closely in some of the other channels. Well, in the interest of time, I’m going to jump to the mode from a little bit earlier. This is a loop that Scott put together. So it shows the most visible and the modus infrared and then it’s going to cycle through the severe reports at the time at the image and then the severe reports an hour later and you can really see just the blossoming, that so this mode of imagery is just before the line exploded.

00:12:10:19 – 00:12:52:15
Speaker 2
So the, severe weather reports at the time of the imagery are fairly limited. But an hour later, they are all over the place. So one inch hail and just a couple of wind gusts and one tornado. And then you see the family of tornadoes and the multitude of hail reports and gusts afterwards. So I thought, this is a pretty nice animation showing how the, showing how you can anticipate looking at the Motus imagery and at the infrared, how that system is going to evolve with time, knowing that almost looks like a, a v notch up.

00:12:52:26 – 00:13:26:14
Speaker 2
Near green. Is that green Bay up there? It’s actually Milwaukee. Milwaukee? Yeah, it’s it’s almost an enhanced view, but not yeah, we get we heard two different supercells. The southern one there is just coming just across the border. And they they were massive underachievers. They looked good on satellite and radar. Particularly. And then when it as it went offshore, it looked like it was a waterspout.

00:13:27:27 – 00:13:52:28
Speaker 2
But we, you know, we couldn’t we’re not really sure what happened there. People just weren’t observing things correctly from the from the falling out of the sky. Yeah. So yeah, it did. We were definitely consider it had a nice p. We’re in a, But the rotation never really got organized.

00:13:53:01 – 00:14:01:13
Speaker 2
On that. Well, that’s that’s all I have right now. If you want to, I think be done. You’re going to give it to, Ken now to talk about some of the down versus potential.

00:14:01:16 – 00:14:07:09
Speaker 1
Yes. Let’s go to Ken prior, nes this now.

00:14:07:12 – 00:14:49:16
Speaker 2
Okay. Okay. So, yes, I’m actually running as a view, for my presentation. And this is going to be brief. Just a couple of, satellite, images here to highlight, the imagery that Scott has already presented. He presented a very good overview of the evolution of the entire, severe weather outbreak associated with this intense, cyclone system that developed over in the upper Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes region.

00:14:49:23 – 00:15:40:24
Speaker 2
I’m going to focus primarily on, some of the severe down burst and severe convective wind activity that was observed, over southern Lake Michigan. From the Chicago area. You are a, western Michigan coastline, but I’m going to begin here. This is an enhanced, water vapor minus thermal infrared. So this is channel three, minus channel four, brightness temperature difference, that it’s enhanced to show not only a coldest cloud chart that you can see here, highlighted, but also to show regions of mid tropospheric dry air that is interacting with this convection.

00:15:40:24 – 00:16:17:02
Speaker 2
And, this is 1915 C on November 17th. This was shortly after the, broken line of severe thunderstorms moved through the Chicago area. But you can see a, linear, system here of cold cloud tops over Lake Michigan. And, during the time period between 1900 and 20 UTC, some of the highest wind gusts over the southern Lake Michigan area were recorded.

00:16:17:04 – 00:16:56:27
Speaker 2
And, the next frame shows here that the linear convective system moved onshore over western Michigan. And near this time, a number of severe wind reports were recorded, along the western coast of Michigan, especially at, South Haven, which is, southwestern Michigan, as well as, I believe, Saint Joseph. Michigan area. Now, taking a look here, we’ll zoom in.

00:16:57:17 – 00:17:43:16
Speaker 2
This is again a different version of the same, water vapor, minus infrared brightness, temperature difference image. I’ll go ahead here and stop the animation just to point out some features. I’ve also, overlaying radar, level two red reflectivity, from the Chicago, red, but to point out that the coldest cloud tops here are shown as a bright magenta shading, where as the driest air in the mid troposphere, or this would be anywhere, say, between the 507 hundred millibar level is shown by a dark blue shading.

00:17:43:16 – 00:18:11:16
Speaker 2
As we can see here over western Illinois or in the eastern Missouri. It’s going to be interesting here as this convective system moves over Lake Michigan to show how this dry air interacted with the leading line of convective storms. First, as this line of storms through the Chicago area and then as it moved eastward over Lake Michigan. Let’s go ahead here.

00:18:12:16 – 00:18:53:21
Speaker 2
And we’ll just, slowly page through. We can see here the line of storms approaching the Chicago area. And I believe it’s about, at 1845 a that a wind gust of 65 knots, was recorded by an offshore wind sensor about four miles northeast of Chicago. So about in this area where we can see a red arrow and we can say here, definitely at this time, a line of storms was moving up just offshore over the lake.

00:18:53:22 – 00:19:21:13
Speaker 2
Unnecessary came 50 shortly after that wind gust occurred. You can see a very intense cell embedded within a line that appears to be taking on a bowing shape. So that’s a good indicator that a downed burst had occurred. Also wanted to show at the same time, we see these notches of dry air starting to appear here on the southwestern flank of the convective system.

00:19:21:16 – 00:19:52:25
Speaker 2
And this will continue to evolve over the next couple of hours as this, broken line of storms moves forward over Michigan and northwestern Indiana. And what I believe during this, two hour time period between 18 and 2000 CE. Oh, sorry about that. Let’s go back to, during this time, between 18 and 2000 feet. Is that the upper level?

00:19:52:25 – 00:20:33:13
Speaker 2
Low, that I am placing here over western Illinois was intensifying rapidly. And along with that, we have this very strong mid troposphere wind flow, southwesterly wind flow in to the south western flank of this convective system. And when this very dry mid tropospheric air interacted with these intense convective storms associated with the squall line, that provided a large amount of energy for strong downdrafts and down to earth.

00:20:33:16 – 00:21:15:25
Speaker 2
So if we move out here to about 1945, a at this time a wind sensor, and this is from the same network, of the as the wind sensor, in the Chicago area. And that recorded a 65 knot wind that’s part of the Great Lakes, environmental research lab that work the wind sensor in Michigan City, Indiana, where the red arrow is pointing now, recorded a wind gust of 74 knots, which was one of the highest non tornadic thunderstorm wind gusts of this event.

00:21:15:27 – 00:21:55:02
Speaker 2
And we can see an embedded cell here just moving over a Indiana coastline and into extreme southwestern Michigan. Even though this embedded cell was small and does show some rotation, which indicates that this could have been a small embedded supercell, storm, in this line that produced that severe downdraft and also very close to this time, high wind gusts were recorded further north, I believe, in Saint Joseph, Michigan, as well as at, South Haven, Michigan.

00:21:55:06 – 00:22:22:07
Speaker 2
And these wind gusts, I believe, approached severe limits. So this was one of the most vigorous time periods for this convection event. You know, there’s a lot more to say. The squall line, continued to move very rapidly eastward over the Ohio Valley. Over the next 12 hours and even affected a Baltimore and Washington metro areas.

00:22:22:14 – 00:22:48:06
Speaker 2
Shortly after midnight on the 18th, there will be more to come out of a review of the impact of that squall line in the Mid Atlantic region. But that’s all I have. Now for the Great Lakes. Any questions?

00:22:48:09 – 00:23:11:17
Speaker 1
Okay. Well thank you. Can I’m going to, make myself the presenter again here, and we’ll just take a brief look at some, real time weather. So let me go to the latest image. Right here is the visible image. And along with the surface observations, and you can see this very dramatic front across, Montana and extending down towards, Wyoming.

00:23:11:26 – 00:23:43:24
Speaker 1
Notice yesterday evening, Great Falls, the temperature dropped from 56 to 11, I believe it was, within about three hours. So it is a very, dramatic change in temperature. Is that, Arctic airmass move through the region? There’s some snow occurring across, Montana, as you can see in some of the obs here. But, as this front is, heading towards the southeast and, it’s characterized by this very shallow Arctic air mass, as you can see from the Great Falls, sounding.

00:23:43:24 – 00:24:20:29
Speaker 1
And whenever you see these shallow Arctic air masses, remember that mass will really struggle, with this, that, the temperatures will typically be quite a bit colder than what mass will be forecasting. So that’s something to watch for if you’re in the central and southern high Plains here for the next day or so. And speaking of cold, I’m going to, go to Alaska here and turn it over to Scott Brockmire to talk a little bit about Alaska.

00:24:21:01 – 00:24:43:27
Speaker 2
All right. As we all probably heard, there is an Arctic air mass that is heading toward Conus. And it’s I thought it was very interesting to take a look at, where that Arctic air is brewing up in Canada and, and Alaska. So I’ve got a high resolution I r image from the first instrument on the satellite.

00:24:44:14 – 00:25:07:27
Speaker 2
And with this air enhancement, the colder air is are in the darker blues and the purples. And if I zoom in on Alaska. I go to the next image here.

00:25:07:29 – 00:25:31:02
Speaker 2
If I zoom in on Alaska, we see these small little areas where the cold air is draining into the valley. So with the darker blue enhancements we see the IRS are in the minus. Upper edges of minus.

00:25:31:05 – 00:25:51:28
Speaker 2
30s. So that’s really, really cold air. And it’s, you know, like I said, it has been draining into the valley areas and we see some ups here. Here’s an, Mist.

00:25:52:00 – 00:26:01:05
Speaker 2
30.

00:26:01:07 – 00:26:13:24
Speaker 2
Four. However, it does look like they do have a patch of purple, which is some high clouds. So I think that has helped to keep that area from, getting extremely,

00:26:13:26 – 00:26:40:22
Speaker 2
All but I wanted to look at the, area of. The. The Yukon, where it’s even colder. And if I zoom in on that area now, we see a lot of purples, which are areas where in the air, we get temperatures colder than the magic -40. So, you see, there are drainage into all these valley areas here.

00:26:40:22 – 00:27:12:21
Speaker 2
So this is where the Arctic air is, is, is, it’s, the carrying area and then, the, the, the pattern will, eventually haul all this Arctic air toward Conus. And it’s already started, actually. So, yeah, with the fire as I are, we can see some very interesting details, on this, cold air that you would have a hard time seeing this.

00:27:12:21 – 00:27:21:02
Speaker 2
In fact, I don’t think you would be able to see this type of, high detail if you looked at Ecos imagery.

00:27:21:04 – 00:27:30:17
Speaker 1
Okay. Any questions or comments or requests?

00:27:30:19 – 00:27:53:13
Speaker 2
Scott, this is Bernie. Would you happen to know the, Let me see. What would it be? It’s somewhere around 3.7 for the bears. Do you know what the cold in sensitivity is for that? Like, does it go down to -40 or 50 or is that then like the goes where it starts getting noisy around those temperatures? Off the top of my head?

00:27:53:13 – 00:28:10:25
Speaker 2
I’m not sure I’d have to look that up, but I haven’t seen on the inventory that I’ve looked at. I haven’t seen that cold and problem that we see on the coast, I think, but I haven’t really looked at a whole lot of it.

00:28:10:27 – 00:28:33:09
Speaker 1
Okay, before we conclude here, I’m just going to, point out where the recording of, these visit satellites, sessions are. If you go to the visit home page, just click on, visit Satellite Chat over here on the left and you’ll see, that the past recordings. I’ll put this recording here, within an hour or so.

00:28:33:09 – 00:28:58:21
Speaker 1
And, importantly, follow us on Twitter at this address up here, this, Snapchat, if you have any questions or comments. This is a great place for us for you to interact with us, ask, comments or, if you have any request, we can listen to those on here. Anything else before we, conclude for today?

00:28:58:24 – 00:29:00:27
Speaker 1
Okay. Well, thank you, everybody, and have a great day.