December 13, 2007
Special Feature: Artwork from Space
Ana pointed out that our friends at CIMSS/SSEC, University of Wisconsin, have rolled out a new product providing near real time MODIS mozaics at 2 km, 1km and 250m resolution. On 12/13/2007, I found this piece of artwork in the imagery.
It is a piece of a granule off the Delaware coast. Note the ship track in the image. Test for the public: is this high or low cloud and how would you know?
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Looks like low white puffy clouds like you would see if your were on the beach. I guess that means low clouds. I'm not sure what he meant by the "ships track" The track seems to be more of an airplane track.
Posted by: JP at December 18, 2007 11:40 AMFinally! Someone took up the challenge! Thanks to JP for taking a stab at this one.
The streamers you see in this image are horsetail cirrus blowing off the top of the cloud deck which is just to the north of this beautiful image. We know it is cirrus because we can go to the MODIS Direct Broadcast data at the University of Wisconsin and look at the Band 31 (far infrared image). Since the streamers show up in the Band 31 image, we know that these bands are very cold (i.e. cirrus).
I interpreted the wavy line in the right center of the image as a ship track, since it doesn't show up in the Band 31 image and is therefore warmer than the cirrus (i.e. closer to the surface). It could be an aircraft contrail as JP points out, but we'll probably never know for sure.
Thanks again for the comment.
Posted by: Ray Hoff at December 18, 2007 3:49 PM