NOAA and NASA’s next generation weather satellite may provide earlier warnings
A new satellite that will detect the lightning inside storm clouds may lead to valuable improvements in tornado detection. The GOES-R satellite is currently being built with new technology that may help provide earlier warnings for severe weather. The national average is a 14-minute lead time to warn residents of a tornado, but NASA and NOAA scientists are looking to improve severe weather detection to save lives and property. They are developing the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series, or GOES-R, to observe thunderstorm development with much greater spatial and temporal detail than ever before. Severe weather knows no specific season and the new technology aboard GOES-R is expected to help provide earlier detection for warnings, whatever the time of year.
On Jan. 29 and 30, 2013, a winter-time tornado outbreak produced multiple tornadoes from the southern Plains states, across the Mississippi River Valley, eastward to the Mid-Atlantic. On Feb. 10, several tornadoes touched down in Mississippi, destroying 200 homes, damaging and causing injuries near Hattiesburg.
“These storms can spin up pretty quickly which limits warning lead-time,” said NOAA scientist Steve Goodman. “The radar and storm spotter’s view of tornadoes reaching the ground can be blocked by terrain, or visibility is very poor when the tornado is wrapped in rain. And it’s certainly more challenging for storm spotters to observe and confirm tornadoes occurring at night. Sometimes it’s just plain hard to come up with enough advance warning.”
For the first time, scientists will be able to detect the lightning occurring inside storm clouds, and thus better track how developing storms are moving and intensifying before and during the occurrence of severe weather, Goodman said, all of which will help meteorologists better predict weather disasters.
“Based on the GOES-R research, there is a potential for greater accuracy and additional tornado warning lead time,” Goodman said. One significant advancement could help detect developing tornadoes at night to provide the public more time to get to safety.
Studies show that a sudden increase in total lightning flash rate is correlated to impending tornadoes and severe storms. The GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) will have a new capability to take continuous day and night measurements of the frequent intra-cloud lightning activity that accompanies many severe storms. This will help forecasters identify intensifying storms before they start producing severe weather on the ground, enabling the issuance of more timely and accurate severe weather warnings.
“The majority of lightning is the in-cloud lightning and that’s difficult to detect, especially in the daytime,” Goodman said. “GLM will provide new information on lightning in the cloud that our eyes cannot see to allow forecasters to make an earlier determination of a severe and tornadic storms’ potential.”
The GLM instrument will see all types of lightning: cloud-to-ground, cloud-to-cloud and inside each cloud, and because the GOES-R satellite will cover most of the Western Hemisphere, it will help meteorologists track storms over the land and ocean from their inception.
But lightning isn’t the only sign of an impending storm.
Monitoring overshooting cloud tops can provide an early indication of a severe storm. These are dome-like clouds that penetrate above the anvil of a thunderstorm. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on GOES-R will better detect these overshooting tops that indicate a strong updraft.
While the current GOES satellite imager usually provides updated weather conditions during the formation of a storm about every 15 or 30 minutes, ABI will be able to show the changing cloud and weather conditions every 30 seconds in rapid scan mode. When ABI is not monitoring the formation of a storm, it will send imagery over the United States every 5 minutes instead of every 15 minutes, greatly increasing the data available to weather forecasters.
In addition to providing crucial information as part of NOAA’s fleet of operational weather satellites, GOES-R will also monitor space weather, such as solar flares and geomagnetic storms that stem from the sun’s activity and can affect spacecraft and human spaceflight.
The Extreme Ultraviolet and X-ray Irradiance Sensors (EXIS) will detect solar flares that can disrupt communication, power grids and have effects on satellites and airline passengers. The Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) is a telescope that observes the sun to detect eruptions which may result in coronal mass ejections. And to assess radiation hazard to astronauts and satellites, the Space Environment In-Situ Suite (SEISS) will monitor protons, electrons and heavy ion fluxes at geosynchronous orbit. GOES-R’s Magnetometer (MAG) will also measure the magnetic field in space.
NOAA manages the GOES-R Program with an integrated NOAA-NASA program office organization, staffed with personnel from NOAA and NASA, and supported by industry contractors. The program is co-located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. GOES-R is expected to launch in late 2015.
For more information about GOES-R and the current GOES satellite fleet, visit:
Rob Gutro
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Huge proportion of thunderstorms happens in the tropical and subtropical regions. Vertical electrical potential between ionosphere and surface could be as high as 300kV.
NASA’s study has already linked tropical thunderstorms with equatorial electrojet which is created when high-altitude winds of subtropical jet stream blow plasma across the Earth’s magnetic field. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
Worth a try. Hope it works.
“New satellite to warn of severe weather by watching lightning”
Gee, I’ve been listening to it for the last few years intensively … always have a receiver tuned to around 250 kHz (LW or ‘longwave’) during the day and evening hours … I can ‘hear’ discharges when storms first fire up along the ‘dry line’ as far away as the Texas-New Mexico border ….
Of note, too, is the ‘frequency’ (rate of discharges) when a storm REALLY gets cranked up, and one can verify on WSR-88D RADAR imagery that the ‘rain production’ (precipitation) has really picked up … the same ‘processes’ that produce the rain are active performing ‘charge separation’ which eventually leads to a lightning discharge …
Too bad the NLDN (National Lightning Detection Network) is still on a 15 to 30 minute ‘delay’ for free viewing (behind a paywall for up to the minute data)
http://thunderstorm.vaisala.com/explorer.html
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Soooo old tech is now new tech? Lightning detection has been around a long time. Bet it’s going to cost a ton of money to move it from ground to satellite based…
The trouble is, this hasn’t been running since the year dot and will, no doubt, find much lightning that would previously gone unnoticed or at least unrecorded.
Cue screaming headlines “Highest number of lightning flashes since records began! (We’re all going to die! It’s humanity’s fault! Repent now! Give us more money!)”
I would have thought that radio noise would be fairly easily recognised as lightning. Is there some reason that this can’t be used (directionality perhaps?)?
artwest – I LOL. Yup, you got it.
How is this sucker going to wake me up to tell me there is a strong storm coming?
This is being oversold. It might be worthwhile for scientific study purposes, but it isn’t going to save any lives. It isn’t going to tell meteorologists anything they don’t already know from existing systems, like NEXRAD. Even the local television stations have their own severe weather detection systems, independent of NWS and other government systems.
Polarization, more likely; inter/intra cloud creates a horizontal E-field components whereas C-G (cloud to ground) discharges create vertical E-field components …
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Lets see –
“The national average is a 14-minute lead time to warn residents of a tornado, but NASA and NOAA scientists are looking to improve severe weather detection to save lives and property. ”
How wonderful. You are going to give them a few more minutes to move their houses out of the way of the tornado? What DO you people smoke? Got any to spare? Better still, are you open to a brain transplant?
REPLY: Is this what they pay you to do at the USDA Office of Operations in Fort Collins Colorado at taxpayers expense, spend time suggesting people need a brain transplant and that they are smoking some mind altering substance? Bureaucrats displaying condescension for the people they serve don’t wash here.
The warning of even an additional minute can save lives by giving people time to get to shelter, in a tornado a minute is a lifetime. As for property, knowledge of a heavy thunderstorm can give people time to secure items, or get them under shelter. I would assume that since you live in Colorado, you’ve seen massive hail storms that come from those front range thunderstorms. Wouldn’t you like a few extra minutes notice so you can pull your car into the garage so it doesn’t look like a golf ball afterwards?
– Anthony Watts
vukcevic says:
March 1, 2013 at 4:46 am
Vertical electrical potential between ionosphere and surface could be as
high as 300kV.
That low? The UK’s national electricity grid regularly uses 400kV for distribution, and people regularly walk underneath those wires. I think the figure must be wrong.
Any ham radio operator can tell you that lightning is a broadband emitter. Wavelengths of EM radiation anywhere from 1 cm to 1 km (5 orders of magnitude) are produced in abundance. AM Radios are especially effective receivers.
Satellite-borne microwave detection merely gives you improved directionality. Long before a potential thunderstorm starts the circulation going we can tell where it is and which way it is going. A funnel cloud can still develop from a non-circulating updraft in mere minutes.
I don’t understand the proposal. My understanding is that land-based doppler radar provides the best indication of tornadic activity as you are observing the atmospheric conditions that lead to a tornado as opposed to the result (high lightning concentration). What am I missing?
As a weather buff I usually look at the visible satellite, developing cumulus clouds show up ‘before’ the lighting, and you can see with infrared if the clouds are trending towards colder tops. Having imagery only delayed 5 minutes is great, and only a 30 seconds delay in rapid scan is amazing! This is good stuff.
People who live in tornado-prone areas, and the weathercasters who serve them, already know which storms are likely to produce twisters. Knowing when to be awake and alert is the important variable.
If you’re prepared, 14 minutes is more than enough time to reach a shelter.
If you’re not prepared (i.e no shelter nearby, or you don’t know how to find shelter outdoors) even a full day of warning won’t help.
When I was living near Eglin AFB in the Florida panhandle, we had occasion to observe too closely a number of tornados and waterspouts. Over time, we noticed that whenever a nearby tornado formed, the signal from the Pensacola TV station on channel 2 would get covered up with snow (AM noise).
So I began watching the spectrum from 10 to 200 MHz with a spectrum analyzer whenever possible during stormy weather. Eventually I got to see that tornados seem to be associated with extremely intense electrical phenomena which is broadly resonant and centered near 60 MHz.
I Never figured out why. Just a number of observations.
I never got the chance to determine what the maximum detection range for the noise was. It might have given us an idea of the height above ground from where the noise was being radiated.
Sorry, for the typo, it was actually Channel 3.
Thumbs up NASA. This is the kind of really cool space technology that makes us remember why we fell in love with you. Thankyou NOAA too.
This is due to the fact that RF (air) CH 2, the *lowest* TV channel (54 – 60 MHz) is more susceptible to the near-constant lightning than RF CH 3 and above, although 3 is just marginally above 2, in most markets either 2 or 3 is assigned but not both (b/c of the “Adjacent channel assignment rule”) making CH 4 the next occupied TV CH
I have tried verifying this phenom, and the above is my studied observation and opinion. Prior to the occupation of CH 2 (by our local NPR/PBS affiliate) in the DFW area we had no over the air CH 2 in this market (I have seen DX from S. America on CH 2, however!)
Even though a poster above claims that ‘lightning produces wideband spectra’, in fact, it does not. There is roll-off on both the upper frequency (towards blue light) end as well as the lower end (towards DC). The upper freq rolls off at perhaps 6 to 12 dB per octave as frequency is increased (i.e., for every doubling of freq the signal reduces by 6 to 12 dB).
So, CH 2 RF is simply the *lowest* available channel that *lightning* effects are most effectively observable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_broadcast_television_frequencies
Also, being a long-time used of Low-band VHF radios (6 meters, 50 – 54 MHz, JUST below TV CH 2 RF), I don’t recall even one single instance where anomalous wide-band ‘hash’ was present aside from the noise whipped-up by the rapid occurrence of lightning!
Corona forming off the antenna (one hears what one might describe as a ‘ripping’ sound under such conditions) is another thing. That effect disappears upon the occurrence of lightning in the vicinity. This could also explain what was seen/observed in the past on “TV sets” in the vicinity of a thunderstorm.
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I stood in my back yard and watched the December 5, 1975 Tulsa tornado from a distance of roughly a mile. There was very little if any wind at my location. It was an unusually warm day for December. I cannot recall if it was overcast, but it was a reasonably bright day and there were no low clouds that obscured a view of the full height of the tornado. There was no rain at my location and I saw no lightning or heard any thunder. While tornadoes are often associated with storms and storm fronts, storms or storm fronts are neither necessary nor sufficient for tornadoes. It is my opinion (on which I would appreciate seeing data that would demonstrate an error) that a necessary condition is a specific gravity inversion in the atmosphere. A cubic mile of air weighs on the order of 10 billion pounds, so it does not take much difference in specific gravity to allow for a lot of energy to be involved in a few cubic miles of air to swap places with a higher density (read lower temperature or humidity) air a few miles above it. What it also needs is a mechanism to allow that swap. An inversion layer can be incredibly stable as anyone who stood up on the hills surrounding the Los Angeles basin in the early 1960’s and had a clear view of the hills on the opposite side and the tops of those buildings that stuck up through the smog can certainly understand. Once a hole is punched through the heavier upper layer, I suspect the effect is similar to what you get when you pull a plug from the center of a wash tub. I have never noticed a lack of a vortex by the time the washtub was empty. Storm fronts may be helpful in providing the the specific gravity inversion and some turbulence to help form the hole through the upper layer, but they are definitely not necessary. I would hope that the forecasters are looking closely at the relative specific gravities of the air masses and their probable spatial distributions since I suspect that there are very few tornadoes when cold dry air is being overridden by warm moist air.
Of course there are some complications in that the relative specific gravities must be corrected to account for the lapse rate to some common equivalent pressure since they will change significantly in absolute terms during the exchange.
I think I’ve heard of GOES-R before. But wasn’t the full name Goes-r the Goezarian? Who ya gonna call?
I am a retired NWS operational meteorologist and we typically used rapidly increasing lightning in a cell based on the LDN as one criteria for the potential for a cell to go severe. LDN only detects CG strikes though, so this technique may have some benefit for early detection.
vukcevic could mean 300kV/m (i.e., “300 kV per meter”) … I don’t recall right off hand what the number would be … resulting in a number substantially above the “UK’s national electricity grid” …
With a cloud potential-center at 10,000 feet (3 km) this might result in a potential difference of 1,000,000 Volts (1 million Volts) at the rate of 300kV/m to ground.
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Paul Martin says: March 1, 2013 at 7:49 am
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Hi Paul
It is highly variable (space weather conditions), sources quote different values, here taken from NASA it is quoted 200 and 500KV, see illustration 2
http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall07/nats101s34/Lecture28/lecture28erk.ppt#3
Mushroom George,
I am the Gatekeeper, are you the Key Master? 🙂