NUCAPS Soundings and Imagery

The first image below shows the afternoon NUCAPS soundings over AR and vicinity, displayed over the GOES CH2 Vis and NUCAPS 850-500mb lapse rate imagery. The image has data only for the "green" soundings, i.e., those for which both the IR and MW retrievals were successful. This results in a lot of "holes" in the NUCAPS images. Taking away the NUCAPS image (second screen capture below), it's not exactly clear why some of the soundings are green and some adjacent ones are yellow, e.g., over southern AR, as the cloud fields below look very similar. Perhaps the QC process could be modified so that more sounding are included in the creation of the NUCAPS images, as these are much quicker to examine than looking at each individual sounding. BTW, the NUCAPS lapse rates over southern AR are only about 6.5 deg C per km, not particularly impressive. The t-storms in AR today have been mostly sub-severe.  A.Cope