Comments on: Hurricane News and Coolest Pictures EVAH!

By: Gerry L

Gerry L — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:18:55 +0000

I’d appreciate it if anyone with good photoshopping or html skills — or whatever it takes — would edit any images of Gaston that have it headed toward Florida and divert it somewhere else. I’ll be flying into central FL on the 10th, and I really, really don’t want to be messing around with a hurricane.

BTW, the place I’m going was walloped by 3 out of 4 massive hurricanes that hit the state about 5 or 6 years ago.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:39:03 +0000

D’oh! Stoopid me. I’m going blind and had trouble spotting that “12 micron” caption in the image. I still have to wonder if a single pixel was used or if several were used to improve the signal.

I’m accustomed to staring out to space though, and from the ground and using a broad band the sky is typically ~230K on a dry cloudless day (or night). Using the high resolution radiometer which I built a decade ago I can see regions in the atmosphere which are typically much colder though – as cold as ~180K. I’ll have to ask a meteorologist if/why they get those extremely low temperatures in a hurricane.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:32:07 +0000

I wonder which AIRS bands are being used to produce the brightness temperature image. The 210K effective temperatures have me a bit confused though; that implies an emitter like water vapor at very high altitudes or else a very strong reflection of radiation (or lack thereof) from space – or a poor analysis resulting in unreliable temperature retrievals (though I’d be surprised if someone at CalTech would get such a simple thing wrong). The large tracts at ~295-300K suggest that in those areas you can pretty much see right down to the ground.