Utility of Parallax-Corrected Satellite Imagery

Forecasters, especially with the advent of 1-min+ satellite imagery, like to overlay lightning and radar observations on satellite imagery. Given the parallax error in satellite imagery, features in lightning/radar are often displaced from where one would expect them to be with respect to thunderstoms in satellite. Available in the HWT this year is parallax-corrected 1-min imagery.


The first image below shows the regular GOES-14 1-min visible imagery, with Earth Networks Total Lightning point data overlayed. You can see that the greatest lightning activity associated with the strongest cells is oriented south of the strongest updrafts, as indicated by the greatest texture/overshooting tops in the imagery.

Now looking at the parallax-corrected imagery, the cloud features are pulled to the south, and in much better alignment with the lightning cores, and what you'd expect.