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Snow falling around some pine trees

Snowfall Rate Product Captures First Nor’easter in 2022

January 11, 2022

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.

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Frank Monaldo in the video

NASA/NOAA Tech Will Aid Marine Oil Spill Response

December 20, 2021

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.

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Figure: An MHW in Barrow AP in 2007, indicated by sea surface temperature (SST, solid black), climatological SST (SSTc, dotted green), MHW SST criterion (95th percentile SST, solid green), long-term mean summer temperature (LMST, solid blue), and surface air temperature (SAT, dotted black).

Marine Heat Waves in the Arctic Ocean

December 13, 2021

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).

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VIIRS Capable of Detecting Shipping Container Backlog in Light of Supply-Chain Challenges

December 8, 2021

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.

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Figure: S-NPP SFR during the first accumulating snow of the 2021-2022 winter season in the central Appalachian counties.

Snowfall Rate Page for Local NWS Office

December 7, 2021

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.

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Santiago Gasso poses in front of a blurred landscape

Gasso Participates in Remote Sensing International Workshop

December 7, 2021

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.

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Figure: A lunar intrusion (LI) case occurring on May 31, 2020. Plotted are the original space view counts (black dots) and their standard deviation (blue dots) for NOAA-20 ATMS Channel 1 and 16 during the LI event.

Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder Radiance Data Products Calibration and Evaluation

November 22, 2021

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.

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Figure: Flowchart of the satellite and near space platform simulator.

Orbit Simulator for Satellite and Near Space Platforms

November 22, 2021

ESSIC/CISESS Scientists Likun Wang, Ross Hoffman and Kayo Ide have a new manuscript accepted for publication at the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology titled “Orbit Simulator for Satellite and Near Space Platforms Supporting Observing System Simulation Experiments”.

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Last Updated: 9 May 2025