ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Fangfang Yu (STAR/SMCD/SCDAB) has a new article in the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing, co-written with Hyelim Yoo, Haifeng Qian, and Xi Shao. The paper describes the radiometric calibration of the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) Infrared (IR) channels on GOES-16.
ESSIC/CISESS scientists Soni Yatheendradas and Sujay Kumar are co-authors on a paper in Journal of Hydrometeorology titled, “A novel Machine Learning-based gap-filling of fine-resolution remotely sensed snow cover fraction data by combining downscaling and regression”.
The first nor’easter of 2022 swept through the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast on January 2-4, 2022, resulting in a heavy snow accumulation of up to 14 inches in Virginia and southern Maryland and stranding hundreds of drivers on Interstate 95 in Virginia. The NOAA NESDIS Snowfall Rate (SFR) product captured the evolution of the snowstorm with retrievals from the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) sensor aboard the S-NPP and NOAA-20 satellite missions, and the AMSU-A/MHS sensors aboard NOAA-19, Metop-B, and Metop-C.
As part of the NASA grant, UMD, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NOAA, United States Coast Guard, Watermapping Ltd., Maryland Department of Agriculture, Environment Canada, and Marine Spill Response Corporation participated in an experiment to compare oil thickness measurements (both in situ and remotely) in the hopes of validating an oil thickness product. By finding the thickest oil layers, researchers can identify key zones to bring in remediation equipment and clean up the most harmful oil in the environment. ESSIC Senior Faculty Specialist Frank Monaldo is involved in this field work and is featured in a video that highlights this work.
ESSIC/CISESS/SCSB visiting research scientist Tom Smith has a new article in press at Geophysical Research Letters that analyzes events of extremely warm waters in the oceans known as marine heatwaves (MHWs).
As a part of American Geophysical Union’s 2021 Annual Meeting, AGU is hosting a contest in which scientists submitted photos and videos depicting their science without actually saying what science they study.
ESSIC/CISESS Senior Faculty Specialist Yan Bai is a part of a NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) project alongside Changyong Cao, STAR/SMCD/SCDA. The scientists found that VIIRS imaging bands can detect shipping containers at ports under clear sky conditions, despite its moderate resolution and the weak signal. This may enable them to monitor the port activities such as shipping container backlog in light of supply-chain challenges as widely discussed in the media. Figure 1 shows that more than 50 ships were found in the port of Los Angeles on October 1, 2021, compared to about a dozen two years ago, which indicates a potential backlog on that day.
The ESSIC/CISESS snowfall rate (SFR) team, Huan Meng, Jun Dong, and Yongzhen Fan, set up a webpage for the NWS Sterling, VA Weather Forecast Office (Office Call Sign: LWX) at the request of Luis Rosa, a senior forecaster from the office. The page is set for the LWX county warning area (CWA). Currently, the page has the operational SFR images from five satellites but will be expanded to include the experimental SFR from four other satellites. The SFR product is produced at CISESS from direct broadcast data retrieved from the University of Wisconsin. The product latency ranges from 12-25 min depending on the satellite.
On December 1 -3, two members of code 613 participated in an international workshop hosted by the European agency Eumesat and the SOLAS project: “Remote Sensing for Ocean-Atmosphere Interactions Studies and Applications Workshop”. The meeting had an assortment of presentations and discussion panels as well as demonstration of the web and cloud interfaces available for data discovery. Santiago Gassó (ESSIC) participated as one the science organizing committee members, as a panelist and convener.
ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Hu “Tiger” Yang has a new article on the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) in press at IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. The Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) is a passive microwave radiometer for the current generation of polar-orbiting meteorological satellites operated by NOAA. The first two ATMS instruments are onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) and NOAA-20 satellites. The article explains several critical changes in the ATMS operational calibration algorithm since March 2017. Details of the radiance-based ATMS on-orbit calibration are documented and results of pre-launch calibration error budget analysis and post-launch calibration accuracy evaluation are also presented.
