The Great Indian Heat Wave of 2015

Have you ever slept in a really hot room?

Of course, if you clicked on that link, keep in mind two things: perjury is a crime, and extreme heat is no joke. It is number one on the list of causes of weather-related fatalities. It may not capture the attention of the media like tornadoes, typhoons and tiger sharks but, exposure to extreme heat and extreme cold are routinely found to be the top two killers worldwide. (Well, that depends on the source of your information and how deaths are or are not attributed to weather. Some say extreme droughts and floods kill more.)

And of course, video footage of tornadoes and typhoons is more dramatic than frying an egg on the sidewalk or watching someone sweat inside a car. But, a recent heat wave in India is actually grabbing some attention from the media. Is it because there have been more than 2,200 documented fatalities? Or, the fact that it has been hot enough to make the roads melt?

Take a look at this hi/lo temperature calendar produced by the Weather Underground for Delhi, India during May 2015. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that only 4 days during the month had high temperatures less than 100 °F (38 °C). What is more concerning is that 18 out of the 31 days had low temperatures in the 80s. Look at May 18, 25 and 31: the lowest temperature recorded on each of those days was 87 °F (31 °C)! And take a look at the 10-day period in Hyderabad, India (May 20-29): highs near 110 °F everyday, with lows in the mid- to upper-80s.

And, for those of you in Phoenix or Death Valley, it is not a dry heat. According to this website, the automated weather station in Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh state recorded a temperature of 50 °C (122 °F) on May 31st. The day before, the high was 49 °C (120 °F), with a dew point of 24 °C (75 °F), which yields a heat index (or “feels like”) temperature of 59 °C (139 °F)!

Whether you side with Newman or Kramer on wanting to kill yourself after sleeping in a really hot room, with temperatures like this, it might not be your choice. If your body can’t cool down, you’ll be in trouble – especially if you don’t have air conditioning, like a lot of people in India.

You’ve probably guessed by now that VIIRS is capable of telling us something about this heatwave. And, you’re right! (Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.)

You should all know by now that the amount of radiation in the longwave infrared (IR) “window” (10-11 µm) is a function of the temperature of the object you’re looking at. We often refer to an object’s “brightness temperature,” which is the temperature that a black body would have if it emitted the same amount of radiation. With that in mind, here is the VIIRS longwave IR (M-15) image from 18 May 2015:

VIIRS IR (M-15) image from 08:06 UTC 18 May 2015.

VIIRS IR (M-15) image from 08:06 UTC 18 May 2015. Colors correspond to brightness temperatures according to the scale at lower right.

The first thing to notice is: there aren’t many clouds out there to block out the sun. The second thing to notice is: that big, black area in west-central India is where the color-enhancement of the image has lead to “saturation”. The IR color table I like to use saturates at brightness temperatures of 330 K (57 °C), which isn’t usually a problem because most places around the globe don’t get that hot. Some pixels in this image reached 332 K (59 °C/139 °F)! (The detectors of M-15 don’t saturate unless the brightness temperature is higher than 380 K, so this is not a problem with VIIRS.)

To prove there weren’t many clouds, here’s the True Color RGB (M-3/M-4/M-5):

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5, taken 08:06 UTC 18 May 2015

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5, taken 08:06 UTC 18 May 2015.

There is some smog and dust, though, if you look close but, it’s not quite the same thing. And wait! The observed temperatures were only 40-45 °C, not 59 °C! What gives?

Aha! You are now aware of the difference between “air temperature” and “skin temperature”. The satellite observes “skin temperature” – the temperature of the surface of the objects it’s looking at*.  Thermometers measure the temperature of the air 2 m above the ground (assuming they follow the WMO standards [PDF]). As anyone who has ever tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk knows, the egg would never get cooked if you suspended it in the air 2 m above the ground. The ground heats up a lot more than the air does in this situation. One of the reasons is that the atmosphere doesn’t absorb radiation in this wavelength range*- and, if it did, it wouldn’t be an “atmospheric window”.

(* Not exactly. The atmosphere does have some effects in this wavelength range that have to be removed to get a true skin temperature. These effects increase with wavelength in the 11-12 µm range, which is why you may hear it called a “dirty window”.)

Another thing you should already know (even without cracking a few eggs) is that it’s much more comfortable to walk barefoot on grass in a park, than it is to walk barefoot in the parking lot (especially if it’s hot enough to make the asphalt melt). VIIRS can also tell you this.

Below, we’ve zoomed in on the area around Bombay (Mumbai) and the Gulf of Cambay. This is an image overlay that you might have to refresh your browser to see. Bombay is on the coast near the bottom of the images. As you drag the line back and forth, notice the areas with vegetation in the True Color image have a lower brightness temperature than the areas with bare ground.

beforeafter

Vegetation has the ability to keep itself cool (in a process similar to sweating), unlike the bare dirt. Of course, there may be some terrain effects and marine effects along the coastline that are keeping those areas cooler. Although, the terrain west of the Gulf is the hottest part of the scene (notice it has very little green vegetation). And, if you think the marine-influenced boundary layer moderates the temperatures, which it does, it greatly adds to the humidity. Bombay’s highs during the month of May were only in the 90s F (33-35 °C), but dew points were also 80-86 °F (27-30 °C). This gives a heat index of anywhere between 110-130 °F (45-54 °C). And, of course, with all that humidity, it never cooled off at night.

I mentioned smog and dust earlier. Well, the haze, smog and dust were even worse over northwestern India on 20 May 2015:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5, taken 07:28 UTC 20 May 2015

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5, taken 07:28 UTC 20 May 2015.

If you click on the image to see it in full resolution, you can see that the smog is trapped by the Himalayas. That means the people of Tibet are not only at more comfortable temperatures, they can also breathe fresh air.

In case you’re wondering, the dust does show up in the IR as well:

VIIRS IR (M-15) image, taken 07:28 UTC 20 May 2015

VIIRS IR (M-15) image, taken 07:28 UTC 20 May 2015.

Haze, smog, dust, unbearable heat and humidity: it’s no wonder why the people of India pray for the monsoon.

Rare Super Cyclone in the Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean has just had its first Super Cyclone since 2007. The name of it is “Phailin” and I bet you just pronounced it incorrectly (unless you speak Thai). It’s closer to “PIE-leen” than it is to “FAY-lin”. The name was derived from the Thai word for sapphire. (If you go to Google Translate and translate “sapphire” into Thai, you can click on the “audio” icon {that looks like a speaker} in the lower right corner of the text box to hear a robotic voice pronounce it. You can also click on the fourth suggested translation below the text box and try to pronounce that as well.)

If you’re tired of reading about flooding in this blog, you’re probably going to want to avoid reading about Phailin. It already dumped up to 735 mm (28.9 inches) of rain on the Andaman Islands in a 72-hour period. Aside from the heavy rains, Phailin is a text-book example of “rapid intensification”, as official estimates of the storm’s intensity grew from 35 kt (65 km h-1 or 40 mph) when the storm was first named, to 135 kt (250 km h-1 or 155 mph!) just 48 hours later. Here’s a loop of what that rapid intensification looks like from the geostationary satellite, Meteosat-7. (Those are the Andaman Islands where the cyclone first forms.)

VIIRS being on a polar-orbiting satellite, it’s not possible to get an image of the cyclone every 30 minutes like you can with Meteosat-7. VIIRS only views a cyclone like Phailin twice per day. But, VIIRS can do things that Meteosat-7 can’t. The first is produce infrared (IR) imagery at 375 m resolution. (Meteosat-7 has 5 km resolution.) The image below is from the high resolution IR band, taken at 20:04 UTC 10 October 2013:

VIIRS high-resolution IR image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 20:04 UTC 10 October 2013

VIIRS high-resolution IR image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 20:04 UTC 10 October 2013

Look at the structure of the clouds surrounding the eye. (You’re definitely going to want to see it at full resolution by clicking on the image, then on the “3875×3019” link below the banner.) VIIRS is detecting wave features in the eyewall that other current IR sensors aren’t able to detect because they don’t have the resolution. The coldest cloud tops are found in the rainband to the west of the eyewall (look for that purple color) and are 179 K (-94 °C). That’s pretty cold!

Also notice the brightness temperature gradient on the west side of the eye is a lot sharper than on the east side of the eye. This is because the satellite is west of eye (the nadir line is along the left edge of the plotted data), looking down on the storm at an angle, revealing details about the side of the eyewall on the east side. Look down on the inside of a cardboard tube or a piece of pipe at an angle to replicate the effect. (Actually, the eye wall of a tropical cyclone slopes away from the center, so it’s more like funnel than a tube. If you go looking for a cardboard tube or a piece of pipe to look at, the results will be inaccurate. Grab a funnel instead.)

Another advantage of VIIRS is the Day/Night Band, a broadband visible channel that is sensitive to the low levels of light that occur at night. There is no geostationary satellite in space with this capability. The image below was taken from the Day/Night Band at the same time as the IR image above:

VIIRS Day/Night Band image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 20:04 UTC 10 October 2013

VIIRS Day/Night Band image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 20:04 UTC 10 October 2013

The Day/Night Band shows the eye clearly. Plus, being able to see the city lights gives an idea of the amount of people and infrastructure that are in the storm’s path.

Now, hold on a minute. 10 October 2013 was one day before first quarter moon, which means the moon was below the horizon when this image was taken. (Generally speaking, the moon is only up for nighttime VIIRS overpasses that occur from two days after first quarter to two days after last quarter.) If you want get more specific, India is one of the few places with a half-hour offset from most time zones (UTC +5:30), which means this image was taken at a local time of 1:34 AM 11 October 2013. Local moonrise time for the eastern coast of India for that date was 11:33 AM (10 hours later), while the moonset occurred 3.5 hours earlier (10:02 PM). This means you should be asking the obvious question: if there was no moonlight (and obviously no sunlight either, since this a nighttime image), why is VIIRS able to see the cyclone?

Was it the scattering of city lights off the clouds that allows you to see the clouds at night, like in this photo? No, because this cyclone is way out over the ocean, in the middle of the Bay of Bengal. Due to the curvature of the Earth, city lights won’t illuminate any clouds more than a few tens of kilometers away. The center of this storm is about 600 km away from any city lights and is still visible. At the most, only the very edges of the storm near cities would be illuminated if this were the case.

I can see at least two lightning strikes in the image, so is it lightning illuminating the cloud from the inside? No, it’s not that either. See how streaky the lightning appears? The whole storm would look like a series streaks, some brighter than others, depending on how close they were to the tops of the clouds (and how close the lightning was to the position of the VIIRS sensor’s field of view during each scan). The top of the storm is much too uniform in brightness for it to be caused by lightning.

So, if you’re so smart, what is the explanation, Mr. Smartypants? I’m glad you asked. It is a phenomenon called “airglow” (or sometimes “nightglow” when it occurs at night). You can read more about it here and here. The basic idea is that gas molecules in the upper atmosphere interact with ultraviolet (UV) radiation and emit light. Some of these light emissions head down toward the earth’s surface, are reflected back to space by the clouds, and detected by the satellite.

Really? Some tiny amount of gas molecules way up in the atmosphere emit a very faint light due to excitation by UV radiation, and you’re telling me VIIRS can see it? But, it’s nighttime! There’s no UV radiation at night! How do you explain that? The UV radiation breaks up the molecules into individual atoms during the day. At night, the atoms recombine back into molecules. That’s when they emit the light. Look, it’s in a peer-reviewed scientific journal if you don’t believe me. (A shortened press release about it is here.) Thanks to airglow (and the sensitivity of the Day/Night Band), VIIRS can see visible-wavelength images of storms at night even when there is no moon!

Getting back to the Super Cyclone, here’s what Phailin looked like in the high-resolution IR channel the next night (19:45 UTC 11 October 2012), right around the time where it reached its maximum intensity:

VIIRS channel I-05 image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 19:45 UTC 11 October 2013

VIIRS channel I-05 image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 19:45 UTC 11 October 2013

Here, the cyclone is much closer to nadir (the nadir line passes through the center of the image), so you’re more-or-less looking straight down into the eye on this orbit. The corresponding Day/Night Band image is below:

VIIRS Day/Night Band image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 19:45 UTC 11 October 2013

VIIRS Day/Night Band image of Super Cyclone Phailin, taken 19:45 UTC 11 October 2013

Once again, the cyclone is illuminated by airglow. (Some of the outer rainbands are also being lit up by city lights, which are visible through the clouds.) The only question is, what is that bright thing off the coast of Burma (Myanmar) that shows up in both Day/Night Band images? It looks like a huge, floating city. According to Google Maps, there’s nothing there. That is one question I don’t have the answer to (*see Update #2*).

Any other questions about cyclones in India? Check out this FAQ guide put out by the India Meteorological Department.

With a peak intensity estimate at 140 kts (259 km h-1 or 161 mph), Phailin was one of the strongest cyclones ever in the Indian Ocean. (Only 2007’s Gonu – 145 kt – was stronger. Several other storms have been estimated at 140 kt.) The last time a cyclone of Phailin’s intensity hit India, over 10,000 people died. Credit must be given to the Indian government, who successfully evacuated 900,000 people from the coast (the article refers to 9.1 lakhs; one lakh is 100,000), and so far, only about 25 people have been confirmed dead. In fact, fewer people were killed by this cyclone than were killed by a panicked stampede outside a temple in central India the same weekend.

 

UPDATE #1 (15 October 2013): The Day/Night Band also captured the power outages caused by Phailin. Here is a side-by-side comparison of Day/Night Band images along the coast of the state of Odisha (also called Orissa), which took a direct hit from the cyclone – a zoomed in and labelled version of the 10 October image above (two days before landfall) against a similar image from 14 October 2013 (two days after landfall):

VIIRS Day/Night Band images from before and after Super Cyclone Phailin made landfall along the east coast of India.

VIIRS Day/Night Band images from before and after Super Cyclone Phailin made landfall along the east coast of India.

Notice the lack of lights in and around the small city of Berhampur. That’s roughly where Phailin made landfall. Also, notice the difference in appearance of the metropolitan area of Calcutta. It almost appears as if the city was cut in two as a result of electricity being out in large parts of the city.

 

UPDATE #2 (15 October 2013): Thanks to Renate B., we’ve figured out the bright lights over the Bay of Bengal near the coast of Myanmar (Burma) are due to offshore oil and gas operations. Take a look at the map on this website. See the yellow box marked “A1 & A3”? That is a hotly contested area for gas and oil drilling, right where the bright lights are. It is claimed by Burma (Myanmar) and India, China and South Korea are all invested in it. China has built a pipeline out to the site that cuts right through Myanmar (Burma) that some of the locals are not happy about.

 

UPDATE #3 (16 October 2013): It was pointed out to me that the maximum IR brightness temperature in the eye of the cyclone in the 20:04 UTC 10 October 2013 image was 297.5 K (24.4 °C), which is pretty warm for a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon eye. It is rare for the observed IR brightness temperature inside the eye to exceed 25-26 °C. Of course, the upper limit is the sea surface temperature, which is rarely above 31-33 °C. And the satellite’s spatial resolution affects the observed brightness temperature, along with a number of other factors.

A warm eye is related to a lack of clouds in (or covering up) the eye, the eye being large enough to see all the way to the surface at the viewing angle of satellite, the satellite having high enough spatial resolution to identify pixels that don’t contain cloud, and the underlying sea surface temperature. Powerful, slow moving storms may churn the waters enough to mix cooler water from the thermocline up into the surface layer, reducing the sea surface temperature. Heavy rains and cloud cover from the storm may also lower the sea surface temperature. Phailin was generally over 28-29 °C water, and was apparently moving fast enough (or the warm water was deep enough) to not mix too much cool water from below (a process called upwelling).

It may or may not have any practical implications, but the high resolution IR imagery VIIRS is able to produce may break some records on warmest brightness temperature ever observed in a tropical cyclone eye.

VIIRS View of March 2 Tornadic Storms

NPP/VIIRS passed over Southern Indiana on March 2 about thirty minutes before the most devastating tornadoes struck the towns of New Pekin and Henryville (among others).  At 1935 UTC, a pair of rotating thunderstorms, also known as supercells, were advancing eastward across Indiana.  The easternmost storm spawned the most damaging tornadoes.  Below is a VIIRS true color image from the NPP pass at 1935 UTC.

VIIRS True Color image of the severe storms on 2 March 2012 at 1935 UTC.

A zoomed-in visible view of the storms is below.

VIIRS I-band 1 (375-m resolution) from 2 March 2012 at 1935 UTC

The infrared (I-band 5) image is below, along with some annotations pointing out the two active supercells discussed above.  Note that the brightness temperatures associated with the overshooting top (OST) of the westernmost storm are colder than the easternmost storm, although both storms were quite strong at the time and the eastern storm ended up producing the deadlier tornadoes.  OSTs are transitory, so it’s possible that a new cold OST formed with the eastern storm shortly after the NPP pass.  These very high resolution infrared views of tornadic storms are among the first documented, given the recent launch of NPP.

VIIRS I-band 5 Infrared view from 2 March 2012 at 1935 UTC

To illustrate the effect of high resolution in the IR, below is a GOES-13 10.7 micrometer IR image from 1932 UTC, which has 4-km resolution at nadir.  The coldest brightness temperature in the westernmost storm in southern Indiana from GOES is 206.6 K, but with VIIRS it’s 195 K.

GOES-13 4-km IR Image from 1932 UTC on 2 March. Compare this image to the 375-m VIIRS image above to see the improvement provided by VIIRS over GOES.

The day after the tornadoes, relatively cloud-free skies in eastern Kentucky allowed VIIRS to see some of the tornado tracks.  In the image below, the faint white lines circled in red in Kentucky and West Virginia denote the new tornado damage paths.  When green vegetation is disrupted/destroyed, the result is typically a brighter scene at visible wavelengths.

VIIRS I-band 1 from 3 March 2012 over eastern KY and western WV. The tornado tracks are circled and show up as faint white lines

 

Tropical Cyclone Giovanna

Back in January, Madagascar was brushed by tropical cyclone Funso, which caused periods of heavy rain, but was a bigger deal for neighboring Mozambique. This time around, Madagascar took a direct hit from tropical cyclone Giovanna, which reached “Super Cyclone” status as category 4 storm just prior to making landfall.

VIIRS got a great look at Giovanna while it was a category 4 storm.

Visible image of Super Cyclone Giovanna

A visible image of Super Cyclone Giovanna from VIIRS channel I-1 taken at 09:47 UTC, 13 February 2012 (Thanks to Dan Lindsey)

IR-window image of Super Cyclone Giovanna

IR-window image of Super Cyclone Giovanna taken by VIIRS channel I-5 at 09:47 UTC, 13 February 2012 (Thanks to Dan Lindsey)

Fortunately, Giovanna weakened rapidly upon making landfall. Moving east to west across the center of the island and over the mountains of central Madagascar, Giovanna could not maintain its Super Cyclone status. At the time of this post, Giovanna was located over the west coast of Madagascar and down to sustained winds of 35 knots, making it a weak tropical storm. Early reports suggest between 2 and 5 people were killed, and some towns on the east coast had 60% or more of their buildings damaged or destroyed.

All things considered, the situation could have been much worse, considering residents were only given a half a day’s warning, and the primary method for disseminating weather warnings is through the use of town criers.

A squall line over Texas as seen by VIIRS

VIIRS RGB "true color" composite

A severe squall line formed over eastern Texas on 25 January 2012. There were 19 tornado reports and 48 reports of wind damage, including “a house destroyed by a possible downburst”, according to the Storm Prediction Center. The high resolution imager on VIIRS captured this squall line as it was rapidly intensifying. Shown below are images collected from channel I-5, the high-resolution infrared window channel (11.45 μm). (Click on images for full resolution.)

VIIRS Channel I05

A squall line over eastern Texas observed by VIIRS channel I05 (11.45 um) at 19:24 UTC on 25 January 2012.

This squall line had several overshooting tops over the Gulf of Mexico that reached a temperature of -77 C. A zoomed-in view of these tops are shown below.

VIIRS Channel I05

A squall line over eastern Texas observed by VIIRS channel I05 (11.45 um) at 19:24 UTC on 25 January 2012.

The dark blue pixels near the center of the image indicate an overshooting top approximately 5 km in diameter where temperatures were less than -77 C. Several pixels in a storm top at the bottom center of the image and in a storm top at the top center of the image (near Galveston, TX) also reached that temperature.

A sounding was taken at 18:00 UTC at the Lake Charles, LA, National Weather Service (NWS) office, which observed a minimum temperature of -74 C at 17.9 km above sea level, indicating that these are some tall thunderstorms. Image courtesy the University of Wyoming.

Radiosonde sounding

NWS sounding taken at 18:00 UTC from the Lake Charles, LA office.

The VIIRS imagery was collected right as the squall line was intensifying. Shown below is the radar loop from the Houston/Galveston radar between 18:00 UTC and 21:00 UTC. Note, at the beginning of the loop, the southern end of system consists of two rather disorganized lines of cells. These lines of cells merge at around 19:25 UTC (the time of the Suomi NPP overpass), and a much stronger and more organized squall line develops.

Radar loop

Radar loop from the Houston/Galveston NWS WSR-88D radar beginning at 18:00 UTC, 25 January 2012.

At roughly 375-m resolution at nadir, the I-5 channel on VIIRS is providing some of the highest resolution infrared imagery available to the atmospheric science community. We are just beginning to see the capabilities of this powerful instrument.