CloudSat made a nighttime overpass (approximately 0630 UTC) of the
thunderstorms responsible for the tornadic outbreak over Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Mississippi on Tuesday, February 5, 2008. This extensive
tornado outbreak, which is responsible for more than 50 fatalities and
billions of dollars in damage, occurred in the late evening and throughout
the night of the 5th into the 6th of February.
The upper image is a nighttime color infrared image from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational
Environmental Satellites with an overlay of CloudSat's descending track.
CloudSat transited the region from north to south, and captured the
convective outbreaks over Kentucky and Tennessee, then observed the
convection over eastern Mississippi. The lower image combines CloudSat
QuickLook images from segments 28 and 29 taken from CloudSat granule
number 9450. The intensity of the convection is particularly evident in
the CloudSat image—large regions of radar attenuation are seen
(represented by a lack of surface signal return in the radar image) as
well as evidence of multiple scattering (seen in the radar image as a
sub-surface return) due to the large hail present in these systems.
Storm reports from this outbreak are available online from NOAA-SPC:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/climo/reports/080205_rpts.html
Quicklook Images can viewed at the CloudSat Data Processing Center.
IR image courtesy of NCAR-RAL (http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/satellite/).
