SATCAST Convective Initiation Examples Over The Memphis Area

Today there is significant convection forming over the Memphis area. Since Memphis is an important airline hub for Delta and Fedex, knowledge of convective initiation is important for planning of airport operations.

Below are some images from the UAHuntsville SATCAST over the Memphis area at 1515 UTC. The red indicates the likely area of convective initiation.

Notice the red area in southwest Tennessee. The radar image below at 1516 UTC shows a complex of storms in west central Tennessee, but no convection in the area of the SATCAST nowcast.

Other radar images from 1526 UTC and 1531 UTC respectively are below.

It's important to note that some of the convection was missed over the TN/AR border due to the temporal difference between the images is 30 minutes due to a full disk scan (full disk scan on current GOES takes ~26 minutes to complete which occured at 1445 UTC and every 3 hours) and a housekeeping procedure at 1532 UTC. Because the convection was rapidly developing, 30 minutes was too long to provide sufficient lead time for some of the storms. Notice how quickly the storms grow over 30 minutes in the two 10.7 micron images below (the image times are 1445 UTC and 1515 UTC, respectively):

With GOES-R, CONUS scans will be available every 5 minutes which will be able to provide better lead-times for the convective initiation algorithm as opposed to the current 15-30 minute temporal resolution current available with GOES.

As the morning progressed, the aerial coverage of the convection increased, and SATCAST was able to depict this increase. Below are some examples of SATCAST depicting the increase at 1602UTC.

And the radar image from this region is below at time 1615 UTC:

It is also important to note that some of the smaller cells in the image above are not detected by the SATCAST algorithm. This is likely caused by the small spatial scale of the individual storms being less than the 4km spatial resolution of GOES in the Infrared region. GOES-R will provide an infrared spatial resolution of 2km which will allow for the smaller convective storms to be identified.