STAR JPSS Website

VIIRS RGB Image
Don Hillger (VIIRS Imagery Team)

19-Dec-19 - A VIIRS RGB image from 2019-12-19 at ~1843 UTC, showing the snow cover swath (blue) across the US Upper Midwest, dumped by an earlier winter storm. Green areas are land, white areas are low clouds. Note high-res details in the snow cover due to lakes and rivers and cities.

Hurricane Dorian
Banghua Yan

03-Sep-19 - Dorian, now a Category 5 hurricane over Atlantic with maximum wind speed of 155 knots (180 mph), is moving closer at fast pace to Florida, Georgia and Carolinas. Satellite observations on its developments are essential in closely monitoring the hurricane's intensification (in particular its upper-level warm core structure) and potential impact regions. To help facilitate the hurricane forecast and strategic planning, as well as scientific investigations on hurricane intensification and trajectory predictions, NOAA scientists produced the following 3D animation of the Hurricane Dorian on September 1, 2019 that captured the temperature differences between the outer and the inner portions of the hurricane, known as the upper-level warm core structure. The images are generated using the vertical temperature profiles derived from limb corrected and gap-filing ATMS data from channels 5 through 12 and the VIIRS cloud top reflectivity at band I1 (0.64um) as background.

VIIRS of Volcano
Don Hillger; Curtis Seaman (VIIRS Imagery Team)

22-Jun-19 - VIIRS Geocolor (true-color) imagery of the ash plume from a volcano called Raikoke on one of the Kuril Islands south of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The eruption happened at ~1800 UTC on 21 June 2019, and these are the first VIIRS views of it, 2 views from SNPP and one view from NOAA-20.

VIIRS Geocolor imagery:
• S-NPP, June 22, 2019, 0218 UTC
• NOAA-20, June 22, 2019, 0308 UTC
• S-NPP, June 22, 2019, 0400 UTC

Antarctica
Don Hillger (VIIRS Imagery Team)

23-Apr-19 - Color-enhanced VIIRS band I5 image of a small section of Antarctica from 21-23 April 2019, showing the cold air drainage (blue) as it adiabatically warms going from higher to the lower elevations.

Hurricane Idai
Don Hillger (VIIRS Imagery Team)

14-Mar-19 - NOAA-20 VIIRS Natural-color RGB image of Tropical Cyclone Idai second landfall on 14 March 2019 near Beira, one of the major ports in Mozambique. Low clouds are white and higher/ice clouds are cyan.

Hurricane Idai
Jingfeng Huang (ICVS); Ryan Smith (EDR-LTM)

15-Mar-19 - Tropical Cyclone Idai made landfall in Mozambique on Thursday night, local time, with its strength equivalent to a Category 3 major hurricane in the Atlantic or eastern Pacific oceans. It is also, unfortunately, the most deadly weather related disaster of 2019, with 100+ people already confirmed dead. This animation shows NOAA-20 RGB composite maps of different channels, and vertical slicing along central latitude & longitude for March 13, 2019. And S-NPP VIIRS I5-Band images before & after landfall (3/14 2250Z & 3/15 2235UTC). From the images, Idai has a very defined eye and has become a very impressive looking storm.

Ice on the Sea of Okhotsk
Don Hillger; Curtis Seaman

27-Feb-19 - VIIRS Natural-color RGB image of the sea ice off the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. S-NPP (03:15 UTC, 27 February 2019). Low clouds are white and snow-covered land and sea ice are cyan.

Super Typhoon Wutip
William Straka (CIMSS)

25-Feb-19 - According to the National Weather Service in Guam, at 1500Z on 25 Feburary, Wutip were at 150mph. That is a Catagory 4 storm, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale. At ~1615Z, S-NPP got a near nadir overpass, whch allowed VIIRS to view the storm very well. The S-NPP VIIRS I-Band 5 (11 µm) image shows the well defined eye. Overshooting tops and convective generated tropospheric gravity waves could also be easily seen in the image along with the prominent eye.

Polar Vortex Event: 23-30 January 2019
Mark Liu; Christopher Grassotti; Shuyan Liu

31-Jan-19 - A whirling mass of Arctic cold air due to the Polar vortex southward into the U.S.A. in late January 2019 was observed from Microwave Integrated Retrieval System (MiRS). This animation shows 500mb temperature of MiRS retrieval from multiple sensors (NOAA-20/S-NPP/MetopB/MetOpC) for January 23 to 30, 2019.

Observations of Polar Vortex - 3D animation
Banghua Yan; Ding Liang; STAR ICVS team

26-Jan-19 - A whirling mass of Arctic cold air due to the Polar vortex southward into the U.S.A. in late January 2019 was observed from JPSS ATMS. The plot is an animation of 3D atmospheric temperature structures at multiple cross-sections on January 26, 2019, by using MiRS temperature sounding products (ICVS Team: Ding Liang, Banghua Yan and Ninghai Sun; MiRS Team: Quanhua (Mark) Liu; JPSS program: Lihang Zhou).

VIIRS Tracks a Massive Ice Storm
Don Hillger; Curtis Seaman; VIIRS Imagery team

22-Jan-19 - VIIRS Day Snow/Fog RGB image, a RGB composite of channels (I-5 minus I-4), I-3 and I-2 where blue is related to the brightness temperature difference between 10.7 µm and 3.9 µm, green is the 1.6 µm reflectance, and red is the reflectance at 0.86 µm, of the Northeast U.S. from NOAA-20 (17:09 UTC, 22 January 2019). The band of darkest red stretching from northern New Jersey into northern Rhode Island is where the most significant ice accumulations occurred. See VIIRS Imagery and Visualization Team Blog for details.