Satellite Imagery (Part 1)

October 27, 2004, 23:30Z/4:30pm Pacific

This was record-breaking soaker of a storm replete
with waterspouts off the Southland coast not long ago. Do
you see the numerous acceleration tracks pushing the storm
eastward, then northeastward once you get into western Arizona?
Tracks also adding additional spin and directional control
in eastern Clark county Nevada. I am amazed that the weather
industry is so ignorant of all this unnatural activity!

October 17 th 2004, 2215Z/415pm Local
SE Idaho/N Utah

A big, diagonal, clear zone where the sky has been
cleared of clouds. One look at this image and there is no
question that something is acting on the weather. And I’ve
already gotten grief for calling for rain showers and then
we sit underneath this hole while the rain passes to either
side. I’am telling this story because I don’t like missing
a forecast! Especially when I wasn’t wrong

…

Looking up from below it was obvious that
something just isn’t right with the clouds. So let’s look
at it from another point of view. The obvious choice was satellite
imagery. I have a few options readily available to me at work,
however, all proved wholly inadequate. Which is why most weathermen
remain oblivious. Resolution was poor just 1 km per pixel
at best in the visible spectrum; it gets even worse in the
infrared and water vapor. 4km is the best available at those
wavelengths. So I went shopping! High-resolution nationwide
visible imagery is for sale at Weathertap.com. The limitations
are that I have to save each image every 15 minutes as they
become available from GOES-10 and 12. No archiving, if you
miss the quarter hour image, it is gone forever! Visible imagery
only works during daylight hours, obviously so much of the
day is then unavailable to me during the low light seasons.
Less work is the upside!

Signatures of weapon use are surprisingly
varied, holes punched out of storms, square ripples stimulating
thunderstorm development, tractor tracks accelerating and
changing the direction of surface and upper wind currents,
and more. This is just a taste of what is going in plain sight
of all.

June 7, 2004–0108Z Southern Montana/East
Idaho/NW Montana

This image was huge for me. Finally convincing me
that this project wasn’t limited to individual ‘events’ but
was everywhere all the time. Soak up all the oddities, squares,
and clouds at 90-degree angles. the whole storm had to have
been digitized into individual cells. I’ve never looked at
the sky the same since.