Adeyinka Lesi and Bryce A. Lampe with Robert M. Aune

UW-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) orbits the Earth once a day, over the same point on the equator. Its main advantage is that it can view the atmosphere over the same location indefinitely. Data from GOES can be used to track features in the atmosphere as they move within the field of view. We intend to determine if a simple, dynamic computer model can be used to accurately predict the movement of these features. We acquired data from the carbon dioxide sensitive channel (13.3 micron) and the water vapor sensitive channel (6.7 micron) from the GOES-12 imager. We chose an image from 12 UTC, September 21, 2005, which contained Hurricane Rita. This provides an extreme meteorological event, as well as, normal weather conditions with which to test our hypothesis. A 2-dimensional convergent barotropic model was used to project the GOES observations along trajectories forward in time. We initialized the model with wind and geopotential height information from the National Weather Service's Global Forecast System (GFS), using the 800 hPa level for the 13.3 micron observations and the 400 hPa level for the 6.7 micron observations. The observations were advanced forward in time for three hours and then compared to actual observations from GOES using objective statistics. It is our intention to determine how accurate the model is at predicting the future locations of the GOES observations. If the model demonstrates skill at projecting the observations forward in time, then the process could be used to generate more accurate wind fields within the satellite footprint.