Ramblings of a Graduate Student

From time-to-time I try to write a post that doesn’t focus so much on the technical side of meteorology, and instead reaches a larger audience.  Tonight is one of those posts.  If you get nothing else out of tonight’s post, I simply hope you enjoy the two images.

Young meteorology students have a tendency to focus on small details, and lose sight of the larger picture.  In fact, one thing I try to stress to my students is to always start with the big picture and work in toward the small details.  The reason being is that if you don’t understand the large scale, then how can you expect to understand the small scale?  Keeping this in mind, the image above comes from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES #12.  This infrared satellite image is measuring the temperature of the cloud tops and maps the resulting temperatures to a color scale.  In this case, the brighter the white, the colder the temperature (meaning the higher in the atmosphere).  Over the eastern United States you can see the clouds associated with the cyclone that moved through the southern United States (and brought Denver snow) earlier this week.  I should also mention that most of the “white” over the southern Rocky Mountains is not the result of cloud cover, but the aforementioned snow that fell.

In addition to being able to look at satellite imagery centered over the east coast (and much of the Atlantic), a separate satellite allows meteorologists to keep watch over the western portion of the United States (and much of the Pacific Ocean).  The image below comes from the the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES #11).  In this image, a cyclone can be seen moving onshore in the Pacific Northwest, and a very power cyclone is present in the Gulf of Alaska.  (Notice how in the comma head area it looks like a hurricane!)

Not much time to blog tonight as today got away from me.  (I spent about an hour and a half with reporters from South Korea doing stories on meteorology in the United States).  However, I thought a nice view of the western hemisphere from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 12.  This image is valid 8:45 PM CST 2 March 2010.  The white (clouds) along the east coast of the United States are associated with the storm that brought snow to northern Georgia and portions of the Carolina’s today.  The good news for the northeast United States is that this storm should remain south and east of them, giving them a reprieve from all the snow of late!  (The storm that brought all the snow to the northeast last weekend is located to the northeast of the east coast cyclone.  It is the white speckled comma looking shape that extends westward toward the east coast cyclone.

This week continues to be a busy one for me, but hopefully in the coming days I’ll find the time in the next few days to discuss the possibility of late weekend or early next week thunderstorms in the central plains.  It is still a ways off, but severe weather cannot be entirely ruled out.  (I should also add that is cannot be entirely ruled “in” either!)