Widespread thunderstorms and several supercells were visible moving east-northeast over Kansas this afternoon. The GOES-19 EMESO-1 Cloud Top Cooling showed several large bursts of cooling as visible in two separate supercells in the image below. The northern one showed a tight circulation and a possible brief tornado roughly 9 minutes after the initial burst of cooling. The southern cooling burst strengthened the outflow burst and produced damaging winds that also showed on radar 9 minutes later. A supercell to the west of the region in the image also showed major cooling about 5 minutes before radar indicated a possible tornado and a warning was put out. Based on these few observations, it seems reasonable that severe thunderstorm warnings could be put out long before radar confirmation based on significant cloud top coolings, at least in mature thunderstorms where conditions are favorable for severe weather. In areas where radar is not accessible, this could also be used to help assist in putting out tornado warnings.
Figure 1: On left: GOES-19 Octane Meso Anywhere CH-13-10.35um and CH-02-0.64um with GOES-19 EMESO-1 Cloud Top Cooling overlaid. On right: Ktwx 0.5 velocity (kts).
It is also worth noting the displacement of the cloud top cooling vs the radar signature due to parallax. Figure 2 shows that this area has a parallax of roughly 19 km to the northwest which would be very important to keep in mind when putting out warnings for any area based on satellite imagery.
Cloudius
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