Clouds, Precipitation, & Lightning Products

There are 5 Cloud and Precipitation products that are grouped as follows.

Cloud and Moisture Imagery

Simulated images from each of the spectral bands showing hurricane Katrina

Digital maps of clouds and moisture for the 16 spectral bands provided by the Advanced Baseline Imager and provided in two different formats, resulting in 16 cloud and moisture imagery products. This group of products is critical to the success of the GOES-R mission.

Clear Sky Mask

Four-level cloud mask using proxy data from SEVIRI on Met-8. Clouds are indicated in white. The colors represent the surface temperature (Kelvin) for the cloud-free areas.

For many of the other products, it is important to determine which portions of the sky have clouds and which do not. More formally, the Clear Sky Mask product provides the location of the cloud free vertical columns of the atmosphere.

Cloud Top Properties

The cloud top properties consist of three categories based upon the algorithms used for processing the data.

These products are based upon the amount of light scattering and absorption due to water vapor and ice particles.

This product whether the water at the top of the cloud is liquid, supercooled liquid, mixed, or solid.

These three products are closely related by Boyles Law about the physics of gases. Boyle's Law is often included in high school chemistry and physics classes as PV=nrT.

Particle size, Type, Height, and Optical depth (left to right)

Rainfall Rate and Quantitative Precipitation Estimation

Quantitative precipitation estimate for 24 hour period

A quantitative estimate of instantaneous rainfall rate.

Lightning Cluster Filter Algorithm

An illustration of possible values for the "eye scene", one of pieces of data in the product.

The location of lightning discharges. The product includes cloud to cloud lightning and cloud to ground lightning when detectable by the GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument.