Tag: satellite image

Local Strawberries Come Home

strawberry field irvine aerial

strawberries

Irvine produces a lot of strawberries! It’s likely the farmland will become housing at some point. Not yet.

Meanwhile, the satellite image (thanks Google) at the top of this post shows one of many strawberry fields in my part of town.

If there’s a crop that lends itself to the anal retentive it’s strawberries! The fields are geometric works of art. The plastic wrapped raised beds run straight as an arrow. My office isn’t as neat.

Helaine stopped for some at a local farm stand. They are exquisite. We’re told they’ll be available through the summer.

Is this a fair trade for pizza? No, it is not.

You take what you can get.

The Tropical Watching Begins

The are patterns to the season. Water temperatures and upper winds favor different places for formation at different times of the season. Right now the Atlantic is open for business!

I’ve been watching Colin. He’s the blob of clouds in the satellite image just above this text . Not very impressive looking.

He was a low then a tropical storm, then a remnant low, now a tropical storm again. Way out to sea Colin has posed a threat to no one.

Later storms will transfix me. Not Colin.

I watch storms differently than amateurs. I’m a charts, graphs and maps guy. Much of what I get is raw data. The rest flows from the Hurricane Center.

The National Hurricane Center is run like a university research project. There are forecasts for sure, but it doesn’t end there. Every system is sliced and diced in the open. The Hurricane Center issues written forecast discussions every six hours.

Because of decades old protocols everything is UPPER CASE. Here’s a short snippet (and a link to the full text of the most current discussion).

SOUTHWESTERLY VERTICAL SHEAR OF 20-25 KT CONTINUES TO HINDER SIGNIFICANT INTENSIFICATION OF COLIN…AND THESE UNFAVORABLE CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED TO CONTINUE THROUGH THE NEXT 24 HOURS. HOWEVER…FROM 36 TO 48 HOURS…ALL OF THE GLOBAL MODELS ARE FORECASTING THE VERTICAL SHEAR TO WEAKEN SIGNIFICANTLY AS COLIN PASSES BETWEEN TWO UPPER-LEVEL LOWS AND MOVES UNDER A SMALL RIDGE…WHICH PROVIDES A BRIEF WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY FOR COLIN TO STRENGTHEN. THE SHIPS AND LGEM MODELS BRING COLIN TO NEAR 60 KT BY 48 HOURS…WHEN THE CYCLONE IS NEAR BERMUDA…AND THIS TREND WAS FOLLOWED FOR THIS ADVISORY PACKAGE.

Nodding off?

Even after a storm dissipates lengthy papers are published. Here’s 43 pages on Katrina!

NHC does a pretty good job mostly–not always. I’m not saying anyone does better, just NHC isn’t always right. That can apply even when a storm is poised for landfall! It’s not like they’re not trying.

The science of forecasting hasn’t been perfected. More data would help. It still won’t totally solve the problem.

It’s easy to be thrown off because NHC issues definitive measurements that make it seem the storm has been measured with a microscope and calipers.

SUMMARY OF 200 AM AST…0600 UTC…INFORMATION
———————————————-
LOCATION…26.3N 67.1W
ABOUT 445 MI…715 KM SSW OF BERMUDA
MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS…50 MPH…85 KM/HR
PRESENT MOVEMENT…NNW OR 335 DEGREES AT 14 MPH…22 KM/HR
MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE…1007 MB…29.74 INCHES

Each of those numbers looks firm and exact. It’s really an estimate. The farther a storm is from shore the rougher those estimates are. Who can question them?

When Colin was first sighted over 2,600 miles from here there wasn’t much more than satellite observations to go by. Instrumentation off the coast of Africa is a little wanting. Everything was an educated guess–no more. It was too far away for the Hurricane Hunter airplanes to even consider.

A bad estimate has little downside when a storm is in an isolated corner of the ocean.

It sometimes seems like the Hurricane Center is cognizant of how their forecasts are used and smooths out the variability in storms. You don’t want people to let their guard down.

The slower a storm moves the more difficult it is to forecast. I’ve never seen the official forecast show a hurricane looping its own track. I’ve seen it happen enough times it no longer surprises me.

The are patterns to the season. Water temperatures and upper winds favor different places for formation at different times of the season. Right now the Atlantic is open for business!

Though the season began June 1 it’s about to hit its most active time peaking the second week in September. It’s seasonal the way the fall colors are predictably seasonal.

I’ll continue to watch Colin for the same reason a ballplayer takes BP in spring training. I need to get back into the rhythm. I need to practice using tools I haven’t used since last fall.

Not every storm will be Colin.

Can’t Sleep

The alarm clock is set to go off in an hour. I can’t sleep. I’ve gotten a few hours of rest, no more.

Hurricane Katrina continues to be my concern. While I tossed and turned, Katrina was turning it up a notch.

REPORTS FROM AN AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT INDICATE THAT MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS HAVE INCREASED AND ARE NOW NEAR 145 MPH…WITH HIGHER GUSTS. KATRINA IS A CATEGORY FOUR HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON SCALE. SOME ADDITIONAL STRENGTHENING IS POSSIBLE TODAY.

Only a tiny portion of Hurricane Katrina is visible on radar. It’s too far from shore – over 300 miles from New Orleans. The satellite image is very impressive with a clearly visible eye. That’s a change from earlier.

While I type this, I am watching WWL-TV New Orleans with streaming video. I think they’re doing an excellent job. I know WDSU is also feeding video, but I haven’t checked them yet.

The most surprising part of the coverage is the lack of traffic showing up on the live cameras. It’s late at night. At this point people are probably waiting until daylight.

WWL is going to learn this kind of coverage is a marathon, not a sprint. They’ll need to keep enough strength and staff to go another few days wall-to-wall.

Phony Hurricane Photo

I know a lot of sites are linking to this photo. As long as you’re here, please feel free to visit the rest of my site – Thanks for stopping by.

Geoff Fox

What is it about the Internet that makes people so gullible? Already today there’s been the swen worm from my dad and now yet another dubious photo. This time it’s Hurricane Isabel as a ship approaches.

How many things are wrong with the photo? The water’s calm. The skies are mainly blue. The ‘hurricane’ which took up a few hundred miles, fits nicely in the photo.

Hurricanes aren’t all of a sudden events… they ease in a little at a time.

This photo will be filed away with the NE Blackout satellite image, the smiling tourist atop the World Trade Center Observatory as the first plane barreled in, and all manner of goofy, tearjerker e-mails about dying kids and picture postcards.

The Internet has made us all publishers. But most publishers understand there’s an obligation to do some fact checking before you send something on its way.

On the Internet, lots of people want to break that big story. It’s just not that easy.

Phony Northeast Blackout Image?

Right after 9/11, a photo circulated on the Internet showing a man on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, facing a camera. Behind him, a plane flew directly toward the building. It, of course, was a fake.

In fact, tools like PhotoShop make it incredibly easy to turn the unreal…real. Such is the case with a satellite image making its way across the world, mostly through email. It has been resized and had the levels tweaked a bit, but it’s the same image.

So far, I have gotten this from my father, my friend Howard, loads of viewers and other well meaning people. If it were true, it would be a pretty spectacular shot.

The real photo is actually a montage of a number of satellite images from a Defense Department Weather Satellite (DMSP). In order to get a fully clear view, and cover the whole country, the actual time frame of the image is Oct. 1, 1994, to March 31, 1995.

Few people look at visible satellite imagery at night, because all you can see are city lights… and normally that’s not very helpful.

If you really take a good look at the phony image, it’s done in a ham fisted way. The areas of removed light shouldn’t resemble a black hole, but should be shades of dark gray. After all, there was some illumination from the moon. Also, there were pockets of lights still working, even within the blackout area. And, though wire reports implied otherwise, most of Connecticut was powered up and good to go.

When I first saw the photo, I knew it was wrong because I know the original very well. It’s a classic. But, I also knew this satellite doesn’t see the whole country at once, nor is the whole country ever cloud free.

There are before and after images from the blackout, and they are pretty amazing. Unfortunately, fact isn’t quite as glamorous as fiction.