Picking Features Out In Weather Visible Satellite Imagery

 

What can you find in a visible satellite image? In the past, I have noted how I like to sit and just watch visible satellite loops to find all kinds of interesting things at different layers of the atmosphere. It’s great for picking out mesoscale boundaries, moisture return, wildfires, hurricane circulation structure and so much more. In this morning still of a 1km visible satellite image, I have pointed out three area’s of interest that show up very well. This will start a series of blog posts covering this topics. SeriesSat1:

Visible Satellite Sector 1 -

At first it’s hard to see until you loop or zoom into the image, but these lines are airliner contrails from morning flights in and out of Florida. Contrails or vapor trails are visible trails of condensed water vapor made by the hot exhaust of aircraft engines in the surrounding cooler atmosphere. These are very common in satellite images and seen almost everyday somewhere across the United States. It almost maps out flights paths in a region, with crisscrossing vapor trails at different heights and directions. There are times you can be standing outside and see a series of contrails with your eyes when looking up, and then head inside and pull the latest visible satellite image to see if you can find the same trail. So, next time your in flight, think about that you might be in a plane producing a vapor trail that I’m tracking on visible satellite imagery loops.

Visible Satellite Sector 2 -

Significant dense fog is a common weather feature in Florida and the Deep South during the winter months. Fog is a cloud bank that comes in contact with the surface, and develops when there is a temperature difference of 5°F between the current ground temperature and surrounding dew point temperature. In this zoomed in sector of the satellite image, you can clearly see two very large fog /clouds banks moving offshore the Florida west coast and Big Bend region. These area’s of dense fog prompted advisories earlier in the morning after developing during the overnight hours. Once the sun came up, they began to burn off and drift west with the weak surface winds out of the east-southeast. Visible satellite imagery is a great way to pick out foggy weather in a region.

Visible Satellite Sector 3 -

Ok, the last sector of this satellite image shows a impressive outline of the western Atlantic surface ridge. The low-level clouds mark the ridge axis, and you almost can clearly see the ridge as a whole just with the cloud pattern itself. The wind flow around a ridge is clockwise, and you can see the wind flow at the southern end coming out of the east, then curving northwest to north on the western peripheral of the ridge, and finally turning northeastward on the northern side of the ridge. A advancing deep trough to the west is already beginning to erode this ridge from over Florida and helping to displace to the east of the coast. Thunderstorms are in the forecast for tomorrow as the trough moves in from the west.

So, there you have it! Three interesting features in this latest visible satellite picture. I plan to continue this series a few more times when I come across anything interesting when viewing satellite loops.