Hillger, Campbell, Combs, Dostalek

A new 4PANEL program for McIDAS was developed to take any 4 image channels and generate an AREA that displays all 4 channels in quadrants with earth-location maps.  The program works on either 1-byte or 2-byte data, thus generating a display without any loss of data precision when used in 2-byte mode.  The 4PANEL program is being used to display up to 4 Principal Component images on one frame on the new SAB RAMSDIS to look for volcanic ash, fires, and snow/ice detection by concentrating on GOES channels 2, 4, and 5.  The program can also be used to display any 4 GOES Sounder channels in a 4-panel display and is being used on the Sounder RAMSDIS to display multi-level water vapor imagery.  Development of 4PANEL was necessary because the standard McIDAS version of PANEL does not work on RAMSDIS units.
 

Progress has been made on a paper entitled "GOES Derived Product Imagery: Statistical Comparison to Radiosonde Observations and Use in Forecasting Severe Convection along a Dryline" in preparation for its submission to Weather and Forecasting.

The GOES Autoestimator rainfall estimation product was added to RAMSDIS systems in the CIRA computer lab. This product was added in preparation for upcoming GOES Assessment Activities.