Watch for Falling Rock

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Curtis_Seaman

Q: When a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

A: Yes.

That’s an easy question to answer. It’s not a 3000-year-old philosophical conundrum with no answer. Sound is simply a pressure wave moving through some medium (e.g. air, or the ground). A tree falling in the forest will create a pressure wave whether or not there is someone there to listen to it. It pushes against the air, for one. And it smacks into the ground (or other trees), for two. These will happen no matter who is around. As long as that tree doesn’t fall over in the vacuum of space (where there is nothing to transmit the sound waves and nothing to crash into), that tree will make “a sound”. (There are also sounds that humans cannot hear. Think of a dog whistle. Does that sound not exist because a human can’t hear it?)

What if it’s not a tree? What if it’s 120 million metric tons of rock falling onto a glacier? Does that make a sound? To quote a former governor, “You betcha!” It even causes a 2.9 magnitude earthquake!

That’s right! On 28 June 2016, a massive landslide occurred in southeast Alaska. It was picked up on seismometers all over Alaska. And, a pilot who regularly flies over Glacier Bay National Park saw the aftermath:

If you didn’t read the articles from the previous links, here’s one with more (and updated) information. And, according to this last article, rocks were still falling and still making sounds (“like fast flowing streams but ‘crunchier'”) four days later. That pile of fallen rocks is roughly 6.5 miles long and 1 mile wide. And, some of the rock was pushed at least 300 ft (~100 m) uphill on some of the neighboring mountain slopes.

Of course, who needs pilots with video cameras? All we need is a satellite instrument known as VIIRS to see it. (That, and a couple of cloud-free days.) First, lets take a look at an ultra-high-resolution Landsat image (that I stole from the National Park Service website and annotated):

Glacier Bay National Park as viewed by Landsat (courtesy US National Park Service)

Of course, you’ll want to click on that image to see it at full resolution. The names I’ve added to the image are the names of the major (and a few minor) glaciers in the park. The one to take note of is Lamplugh. Study it’s location, then see if you can find it in this VIIRS True Color image from 9 June 2016:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite image of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (20:31 UTC 9 June 2016), zoomed in at 200%.

Anything? No? Well, how about in this image from 7 July 2016:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (21:42 UTC 7 July 2016), zoomed in at 200%

I see it! If you don’t, try this “Before/After” image overlay, by dragging your mouse from side to side:

That dark gray area in the image from 7 July 2016 that the arrow is pointing to is the Lamplugh Glacier landslide! If the “Before/After” overlay doesn’t work, try refreshing the page, or look at this animated GIF:

Animation of VIIRS True Color images highlighting the Lamplugh Glacier landslide

Of course, with True Color images, it can be hard to tell what is cloud and what is snow (or glacier) and with VIIRS you’re limited to 750 m resolution. We can take care of those issues with the high-resolution (375 m) Natural Color images:

Animation of VIIRS Natural Color images of the Lamplugh Glacier landslide

Make sure you click on it to see the full resolution. If you want to really zoom in, here is the high-resolution visible channel (I-1) imagery of the event:

Animation of VIIRS high-resolution visible images of the Lamplugh Glacier landslide

You don’t even need an arrow to point it out. Plus, if you look closely, I think you can even see some of the dust coming from the slide.

That’s what 120 million metric tons of rock falling off the side of a mountain looks like, according to VIIRS!

The Sirocco and the Giant Bowl of Dust

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Curtis_Seaman

As mentioned before on this blog, there are typhoons, hurricanes, and cyclones, and they’re all basically the same thing. They’re just given a different name depending on where they occur in the world. Similarly, there are many different names for winds (not counting the classification of wind speeds developed by a guy named Beaufort). There’s the Chinook, the Santa Ana, the bora, the föhn (or foehn), the mistral, the zonda, the zephyr and the brickfielder. (A more complete list is here.) Some of these winds are different names for the same phenomenon occurring in different parts of the world, like the föhn, the chinook, the zonda and the Santa Ana. Others are definitely different phenomena, with different characteristics (compare the mistral with the brickfielder), but they all have the same basic cause: the atmosphere is constantly trying to equalize its pressure.

The Mediterranean is home to wide variety of named winds, one of which is the sirocco (or scirocco). (Europe is home to wide variety of languages, so this wind is also known as “ghibli,” “jugo” [pronounced “you-go”], “la calima” and “xlokk” [your guess is as good as mine].) Sirocco is the name given to the strong, southerly or southeasterly wind originating over northern Africa that typically brings hot, dry air and, if it’s strong enough, Saharan dust to Europe. Of course, after picking up moisture from the Mediterranean, the wind becomes humid, making life unpleasant for people along the north shore. Hot, humid and full of dust. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the sirocco is believed to be a cause of insomnia and headaches.

Now, I don’t know how hot it was, but an intense low pressure system passed through the Mediterranean around Leap Day and, out ahead of it, strong, southerly winds carried quite a bit of dust from northern Africa into Italy. Here’s what it looked like in Algeria. And here’s what it looked like in Salento. See if you can see that dust in these True Color VIIRS images:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (12:09 UTC 28 February 2016).

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (11:48 UTC 29 February 2016)

No problem, right? With True Color imagery, the dust is usually easy to identify and distinguish from clouds and the ocean because it looks like dust. It’s the same color as the sky over Salento, Italy in that video I linked to. The top image shows multiple source regions of dust (mostly Libya, with a little coming from Tunisia) being blown out over the sea. The second image shows one concentrated plume being pulled into the clouds over the Adriatic Sea, headed for Albania and Greece.

By the way, this storm system brought up to 2 meters (6.5 feet) of snow to northern Italy, and even brought measurable snow to Algeria! Africa and Europe made a trade: you take some of my dust, and I’ll take some of your snow.

But, this wasn’t the worst dust event to hit Europe recently. Here’s what the VIIRS True Color showed over Spain and Portugal on 21 February 2016:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (12:40 UTC 21 February 2016).

And VIIRS wasn’t the only one to see this dust. Here’s a picture taken by Tim Peake, an astronaut on the International Space Station. Again, it’s easy to pick out the dust because it almost completely obscures the view of the background surface. But, what if the background surface is dust colored?

We switch now to the other side of the world and the Takla Makan desert in China, where the dust has been blowing for the better part of a week:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (07:11 UTC 4 March 2016).

Can you tell what is dust and what is the desert floor? Can you see the Indian Super Smog on the south side of the Himalayas? Here is the same scene on a clear (no dust) day:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (07:49 UTC 2 March 2016).

There is a subtle difference there, but you need good eyesight to see it. It might be easier to see if you loop the images:

Animation of VIIRS True Color images (1-7 March 2016)

Animation of VIIRS True Color images of the Takla Makan desert (1-7 March 2016).

You’ll have to click on the image to see it animate.

Did you notice the dark brown areas surrounding the Takla Makan? Those are areas that have green vegetation during the summer. Notice how they become completely obscured by the dust as the animation progresses. That’s one one way to tell that there’s dust there. But, as we have seen before, there are other ways to see the dust.

There’s EUMETSAT’s Dust RGB composite applied to VIIRS:

Animation of VIIRS EUMETSAT Dust RGB images (1-7 March 2016)

Animation of VIIRS EUMETSAT Dust RGB images of the Takla Makan desert (1-7 March 2016).

That’s another animation, by the way, so you’ll have to click on it to see it animate. The same is true for the Dynamic Enhanced Background Reduction Algorithm (DEBRA), which we also talked about before:

Animation of VIIRS DEBRA Dust Product images (1-7 March 2016)

Animation of VIIRS DEBRA Dust Product images of the Takla Makan desert (1-7 March 2016)

But, there’s one more dust detection technique we have not discussed before: the “blue light absorption” technique:

Animation of VIIRS Blue Light Dust images (1-7 March 2016)

Animation of VIIRS Blue Light Dust images of the Takla Makan desert (1-7 March 2016).

The Blue Light Dust detection algorithm keys in on the fact that many different kinds of dust absorb blue wavelengths of light more than the longer visible wavelengths. It uses this information to create an RGB composite where dust appears pastel pink, clouds and snow appear blueish and bare ground appears green. Of course, other features can absorb blue light as well, like the lakes near the northeast corner of the animation that show up as pastel pink. But, depending on your visual preferences and ability to distinguish color, the Blue Light Dust product gives another alternative to the hot pink of the EUMETSAT Dust RGB, the yellow of DEBRA, and the slightly paler tan of the True Color RGB.

One question you might ask is, “How come DEBRA shows a more vivid signal than the other methods?” In the True Color RGB, dust is slightly more pale than the background sand, because it’s made up of (generally) smaller sand particles (which are more easily lofted by the wind) that scatter light more effectively, making it appear lighter in color. In the EUMETSAT Dust RGB, dust appears hot pink because the “split window difference” (12 µm – 10.7 µm) is positive, while the difference in brightness temperatures between 10.7 µm and 8.5 µm is near zero and the background land surface is warm. In DEBRA, the intensity of the yellow is related to the confidence that dust is present in the scene based on a series of spectral tests. DEBRA is confident of the presence of dust even when the signals may be difficult to pick out in the other products, either because it’s a superior product, or because its confidence is misguided. (Hopefully, it’s the former and not the latter.)

By the way, the Takla Makan got its name from the native Uyghurs that live there. Takla Makan means “you can get in, but you can’t get out.” It has also been called the “Sea of Death.” I prefer to call it “China’s Big Bowl of Dust.” It’s a large area of sand dunes (bigger than New Mexico, but smaller than Montana) surrounded on most of its circumference by mountains between 5000 and 7000 m (~15,000-21,000+ feet!). The average annual rainfall is less than 1.5 inches (38 mm). That means when the wind blows it easily picks up the dusty surface, but that dust can’t go anywhere because it’s blocked by mountains (unless it blows to the northeast). The dust is trapped in its bowl.

The Takla Makan is also important historically, because travelers on the original Silk Road had to get around it. Notice on this map, there were two routes: one that skirted the northern edge of the Takla Makan and one that went around the southern edge. This part of Asia was the original meeting point between East and West.

CIRA produces all four imagery products over the Takla Makan desert in near-real time, which you can find here. And, in case you’re curious, you can check out how well DEBRA and the EUMETSAT Dust products compare for the dust-laden siroccos over southern Europe and northern Africa by clicking here and here (for the first event over Spain and Portugal) or here and here (for the second one over Italy and the Adriatic Sea).

Indian Super-Smog

Posted on December 8, 2015 by Curtis_Seaman

We’ve poked a lot of fun at China and their serious smog problem. (Just this week, Beijing schools had their very first “smog day.” It’s just like a “snow day”, except you can’t go outside and write your name in it.) But, as it turns out, China is not the only country to produce super-thick smog. India does it, too. And, from the point of view of human health, India’s smog may actually be worse!

The World Health Organization just released a list of the Top 20 smoggiest cities, and 13 of them are in India (plus 1 in Bangladesh and 3 in Pakistan). Not a single Chinese city was anywhere in the Top 20! I’d consider taking back some of things I’ve said about China, except that 1) I never lied (although I did quote Brian Williams), and 2) the Chinese government is now instituting “smog days” because the smog is so bad. What I will do is stop comparing every type of air pollution to Chinese smog. From now on (at least until they start making some positive changes), India is the paragon of poor air quality on this blog.

Since VIIRS has no trouble seeing Chinese smog, it should have no problem seeing Indian smog. And it doesn’t:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-4, M-4 and M-5 (07:14 UTC 18 November 2015).

You guessed it: all that gray area is optically thick smog! Let’s not forget, too, that India is the seventh largest country in world (2.4% of the Earth’s total surface area!), which is quite a large area to be covered by smog.

In the True Color image above from 18 November 2015, you can see that the people of Tibet are grateful for the Himalayas, which are an effective barrier to the smog. They may not get much air up there on the highest plateau in the world, but what little there is is much cleaner than what’s down below!

If your respiratory system is sensitive to this kind of thing, you might not want to read any further. Consider this your trigger warning. For those few brave enough to continue – prepare yourself, because it gets worse!

Here’s another VIIRS True Color image from 14 November 2015:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (06:50 UTC 14 November 2015).

Now it’s even harder to see the background surface along the base of the Himalayas. And, it’s easy to compare India’s pollution with Burma’s – I mean Myanmar’s – clean air.

VIIRS passed over the center of India on 11 November 2015 and saw that almost the entire country was covered by smog, with the thickest smog near Delhi:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (07:46 UTC 11 November 2015).

November 11^th was the night of Diwali, the Hindu, Sikh and Jain “Festival of Lights” celebrating the “triumph of goodness over evil and knowledge over ignorance.” If you clicked that link and thought, “that doesn’t look so bad,” then note that the first few pictures were taken in England. In India, it was much smokier. I guess lighting all those fireworks in India comes with this “pro”: they can light the way through the thick smog; and this “con”: they give off smoke that adds to the thick smog. And, while the smog didn’t stop people from celebrating Diwali, it did affect people’s plans. It also caused a huge increase in the market for air purifiers.

The super-smog was not confined to November or Diwali. It’s still going on! Here’s a VIIRS image from 5 December 2015:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (06:56 UTC 5 December 2015).

I assure you that India and Bangladesh are under there somewhere beneath all that gray muck!

As I mentioned in the previous post, we now have access to data from the new Japanese satellite, Himawari, which can be thought of as a geostationary version of VIIRS. Himawari-8 hangs out over the Equator at a longitude of 140 °E and it takes images of the full disk every 10 minutes. From its perspective, India is right on the edge of the Earth (which, in satellite meteorology is called “the limb”). This means Himawari’s line-of-sight to India has an extra long path through the atmosphere, and that makes the smog look even worse. Here’s a True Color/Geocolor loop of Himawari images of India’s “Worse-than-China” Super-Smog. You can find this and other amazing loops on our new “Himawari Loop of the Day” webpage. We also produce a lot of other Himawari imagery products, which we post here.

Shameless plugs aside, don’t forget: India’s smog is actually worse than China’s. And, unless you live in India, you probably didn’t think that was possible! (If you do live in India, get them to clean up the air!)

Horrendous Haboob in the Heart and Heat of History’s Homeland

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Curtis_Seaman

We mentioned India earlier this year due to a hellish heatwave. It’s only fair that we talk about one of the other cradles of civilization (human history) and another horrible weather-related h-word.

People have been living along the Nile River in northeastern Africa and on the Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years (dating back to the Paleolithic Era). And, every once in a while, a story comes along that makes you wonder why. I’m not talking about the never-ending human conflict that has plagued the region. I’m talking about the hostile climate. (Of course, it wasn’t always hostile. There have been periods of abundant moisture. Read this. Or this.)

If you’ve watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, you are no-doubt familiar with the ancient city of Tanis, and the story about it that was the basis of the whole plot of the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie: 1) shame on you; and, 2) watch this clip.

“The city of Tanis was consumed by the desert in a sandstorm that lasted a whole year.”

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but, that part of the story is false. No year-long sandstorm hit Tanis. And, despite rumors that the actual Ark is buried in Tanis, it has never been found. (Because it’s stored in a giant government warehouse! Duh!) Plus, Indiana Jones is a fictional character in a movie. But, the movie is not entirely false. According to this article, a major archaeological find did take place at Tanis right before World War II (led by a French archaeologist, no less), and very few people know about it because of the war. Plus, there really was an Egyptian Pharaoh named Shoshenq/Shishak.

Even if Tanis was not buried by a year-long sandstorm, that doesn’t mean nasty sandstorms don’t exist. In fact, most of the Middle East is still dealing with a massive sandstorm that lasted a whole week last week. This storm put Beijing’s air pollution to shame. In fact, the dust reached the highest concentrations ever recorded in Jerusalem since Israel became it’s own country in 1948. It was responsible for several fatalities. Here are some pictures. Here’s a video from Saudi Arabia. Here’s what it looked like in Jordan and Lebanon. And, of course, what follows is what the storm looked like in VIIRS imagery.

Since this dust storm lasted a whole week, we got plenty of VIIRS imagery of the event. It started on the afternoon of 6 September 2015, and here’s the first VIIRS True Color image of it:

VIIRS True Color image of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5 (10:06 UTC 6 September 2015)

Can you see it? (Click on the image to see the full resolution version.) A trained eye can spot it from this image alone. An untrained eye might have difficulty distinguishing it from the rest of the desert and sand. Look for the tan blob over Syria that is obscuring the view of the Euphrates river.

If you can see that, you can track it over the rest of the week:

Animation of VIIRS True Color images (6-12 September 2015)

This animation was reduced to 33% of it’s original size to limit the bandwidth needed to display it. It contains the afternoon overpasses (1 image per day) because you need sunlight to see things in true color. And, while it suffers from the fact that animated GIFs only allow 256 colors (instead of the 16,777,216 colors possible in the original images), you should be able to see the dust “explode” over Israel, Lebanon and Jordan over the next two days. It eventually advects over northwestern Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Cyprus during the rest of the week.

The last time we looked at a major dust storm, the dust was easy to see. It was blown out over the ocean, which is a nice, dark background to provide the contrast needed to see the dust. Here, the dust is nearly the same color as the background – because it is made out of what’s in the background. Is there a better way to detect dust in situations like this?

EUMETSAT developed an RGB composite explicitly for this purpose, and they call it the “Dust RGB.” And we’ve talked about it before. And, here’s what that looks like:

Animation of EUMETSAT Dust RGB images from VIIRS (6-12 September 2015)

Since this RGB composite uses only infrared (IR) channels, it works at night (although not as well) so you can get twice as many images over this time period. It also makes dust appear hot pink. The background appears more blue in the daytime images, so the dust does stand out. But, the background becomes more pink/purple at night, so the signal is harder to see at those times. Still, you can see the dust spread from Syria to Egypt over the course of the week.

My colleagues at CIRA have developed another way to identify dust: DEBRA. DEBRA is an acronym for Dynamic Enhanced Background Reduction Algorithm. As the name implies, DEBRA works by subtracting off the expected background signal, thereby reducing the background and enhancing the signal of the dust. So, instead of trying to see brown dust over a brown background (i.e. True Color RGB) or trying to see hot pink dust over a pinkish/purplish background (i.e. EUMETSAT Dust RGB) you get this:

Animation of VIIRS “DEBRA Dust” images (6-11 September 2015)

DEBRA displays dust as yellow over a grayscale background. The intensity of the yellow is related to the confidence that a given pixel contains dust. It could display dust as any color of the rainbow, but yellow was chosen specifically because there are fewer people that are colorblind toward yellow than any other type of colorblindness. That makes the dust very easy to see for nearly everyone. (Sorry, tritanopes and achromats.) One of the biggest complaints about RGB composites is that the 7-12% of the population that has some form of colorblindness have difficulty trying to see what the images are designed to show. (Since I’m so fond of RGB composites, I better check my white male trichromat privilege. Especially since, according to that last link, white males are disproportionately colorblind.) The point is: we now have a dust detection algorithm that works well with (most) colorblind people, and it makes dust easier to see even for people that aren’t colorblind. DEBRA also works at night, but I’ve only shown daytime images here to save on filesize.

The last two frames of the DEBRA animation show something interesting: an even more massive dust storm in northern Sudan and southern Egypt! Fortunately, fewer people live there, but anyone who was there at the time must have a story to tell about the experience. Here are closer up views of that Sudanese sandstorm (or should I say “haboob” since this is the very definition of the word?). First the True Color:

VIIRS True Color image (10:32 UTC 10 September 2015)

Next, the EUMETSAT Dust RGB:

VIIRS EUMETSAT Dust RGB image (10:32 UTC 10 September 2015)

And, finally DEBRA:

MSG-3 DEBRA Dust image (10:30 UTC 10 September 2015)

If you’re wondering why the DEBRA image doesn’t seem to line up with the other two, it’s because I cheated. The DEBRA image came from the third Meteosat Second Generation satellite (MSG-3), which is a geostationary satellite. The majority of the haboob was outside our normal VIIRS processing domain for DEBRA, so I grabbed the closest available MSG-3 image. It has much lower spatial resolution, but similar channels, so DEBRA works just as well. And, you don’t necessarily need high spatial resolution to see a dust storm that is ~ 1000 km across. What MSG-3 lacks in spatial resolution, it makes up for in temporal resolution. Instead of two images per day, you get 1 image every 15 minutes. Here is a long loop of MSG-3 images over the course of the whole week, where you can see both sandstorms: (WARNING: this loop may take a long time to load because it contains ~600 large images). Keep your eye on Syria early on, then on Egypt and Sudan. Both haboobs appear to be caused by the outflow of convective storms. Also, how many other dust storms are visible over the Sahara during the week? For comparison purposes, here’s a similar loop of EUMETSAT Dust images. (MSG-3 does not have True Color capability.)

These sandstorms have certainly made their impact: they’ve broken poor air quality records, killed people, made life worse for refugees, closed ports and airports, and even affected the Syrian civil war. Plus, the storms coincided with a heatwave. Having +100 °F (~40 °C) temperatures, high humidity and not being able to breathe because of the dust sounds awful. Correction: it is awful. And, life goes on in the Middle East.

UPDATE #1 (17 September 2015): Here’s a nice, zoomed-in, animated GIF of the Syrian haboob as seen by the DEBRA dust algorithm, made from MSG-3 images:

Click to view 59 MB Animated GIF

UPDATE #2 (17 September 2015): Steve M. also tipped me off to another – even more impressive – haboob that impacted Iraq at the beginning of the month (31 August – 2 September 2015). Here’s an animation of the DEBRA view of it:

Click to view 28 MB Animated GIF

This dust storm was even seen at night by the Day/Night Band, thanks to the available moonlight:

VIIRS Day/Night Band image of Iraq (22:43 UTC 31 August 2015)

Look at that cute little swirl. Well, it would be cute if it weren’t so hazardous.

UPDATE #3 (4 October 2021): Here is a link to more information about color blindness, provided by an avid viewer: Everything you need to know about Color Blindness

Germany’s Magic Sparkle

Posted on March 16, 2015 by Curtis_Seaman

You may or may not have heard that a small town in Italy received 100 inches (250 cm; 2.5 m; 8⅓ feet; 8 x 10^-17 parsecs) of snow in 18 hours just last week (5 March 2015). That’s a lot of snow! It’s more than what fell on İnebolu, Turkey back in the beginning of January. But, something else happened that week that is much more interesting.

All you skiers are asking, “What could be more interesting than 100 inches of fresh powder?” And all you weather-weenies are asking, “What could be more interesting than being buried under a monster snowstorm? I mean, that makes Buffalo look like the Atacama Desert!” The answer: well, you’ll have to read the rest of this post. Besides, VIIRS is incapable of measuring snow depth. (Visible and infrared wavelengths just don’t give you that kind of information.) So, looking at VIIRS imagery of that event isn’t that informative.

This is (or was, until I looked into it in more detail) another mystery. Not a spooky, middle-of-the-night mystery, but one out in broad daylight. (We can thus automatically rule out vampires.)

It started with a comparison between “True Color” and “Natural Color” images over Germany from 9 March 2015:

VIIRS True Color RGB composite of channels M-3, M-4 and M-5, taken 11:54 UTC 9 March 2015.

VIIRS Natural Color RGB composite of channels M-5, M-7 and M-10, taken 11:54 UTC 9 March 2015.

The point was to show, once again, how the Natural Color RGB composite can be used to differentiate snow from low clouds. That’s when I noticed it. Bright pixels (some white, some orange, some yellow, some peach-colored) in the Natural Color image, mostly over Bavaria. (Remember, you can click on the images, then click again, to see them in full resolution.) Thinking they might be fires, I plotted up our very own Fire Temperature RGB:

VIIRS Fire Temperature RGB composite of channels M-10, M-11 and M-12 from 11:54 UTC 9 March 2015.

I’ve gone ahead and drawn a white box around the area of interest. Let’s zoom in on that area for these (and future) images.

VIIRS True Color RGB (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015). Zoomed in and cropped to highlight the area of interest.

VIIRS Natural Color RGB (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015). Zoomed in and cropped to highlight the area of interest.

VIIRS Fire Temperature RGB (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015). Zoomed in and cropped to highlight the area of interest.

Now, these spots really show up. But, they’re not fires! Fires show up red, orange, yellow or white in the Fire Temperature composite (which is one of the benefits of it). They don’t appear pink or pastel blue. What the heck is going on?

Now, wait! Go back to the True Color image and look at it at full resolution. There are white spots right where the pastel pixels show up in the Fire Temperature image. (I didn’t notice initially, because white spots could be cloud, or snow, or sunglint.) This is another piece of evidence that suggests we’re not looking at fires.

For a fire to show up in True Color images, it would have to be about as hot as the surface of the sun and cover a significant portion of a 750-m pixel. Terrestrial fires don’t typically get that big or hot on the scale needed for VIIRS to see them at visible wavelengths. Now, fires don’t have to be that hot to show up in Natural Color images, but even then they appear red. Not white or peach-colored. If a fire was big enough and hot enough to show up in a True Color image, it would certainly show up in the high-resolution infrared (IR) channel (I-05, 11.45 µm), but it doesn’t:

VIIRS high-resolution IR (I-05) image (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015).

You might be fooled, however, if you looked at the mid-wave IR (I-04, 3.7 µm) where these do look like hot spots:

VIIRS high-resolution midwave-IR (I-04) image (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015).

What’s more amazing is I was able to see these bright spots all the way down to channel M-1 (0.412 µm), the shortest wavelength channel on VIIRS:

VIIRS “deep blue” visible (M-1) image (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015).

So, what do we know? Bright spots appear in all the bands where solar reflection contributes to the total radiance (except M-6 and M-9). I checked. (They don’t show up in M-6 [0.75 µm], because that channel is designed to saturate under any solar reflection so everything over land looks bright. They don’t show up in M-9 [1.38 µm] because solar radiation in that band is absorbed by water vapor and never makes it to the surface.) Hot spots do not coincide with these bright spots in the longer wavelength IR channels (above 4 µm).

What reflects a lot of radiation in the visible and near-IR but does not emit a lot in the longwave IR? Solar panels. That’s the answer to the mystery. VIIRS was able to see solar radiation reflecting off of a whole bunch of solar panels. That is the source of Germany’s “magic sparkle”.

Don’t believe me? First off, Germany is a world leader when it comes to producing electricity from solar panels. Solar farms (or “solar parks” auf Deutsch) are common – particularly in Bavaria, which produces the most solar power per capita of any German state.

Second: I was able to link specific solar parks with the bright spots in the above images using this website. (Not all of those solar parks show up in VIIRS, though. I’ll get to that.) And these solar parks can get quite big. Let’s take a look at a couple of average-sized solar parks on Google Maps: here and here. The brightest spot in the VIIRS Fire Temperature image (near 49° N, 11° E) matches up with this solar park, which is almost perfectly aligned with the VIIRS scans and perpendicular to the satellite track.

Third: it’s not just solar parks. A lot of people and businesses have solar panels on their roofs. Zoom in on Pfeffenhausen, and try to count the number of solar panels you see on buildings.

One more thing: if you think solar panels don’t reflect a lot of sunlight, you’re wrong. Solar power plants have been known reflect so much light they instantly incinerate birds*. (*This is not exactly true. See the update below.)

Another important detail is that all of the bright spots visible in the VIIRS images are a few degrees (in terms of satellite viewing angle) to the west of nadir. Given where the sun is in the sky this time of year (early March) and this time of day (noon) at this latitude (48° to 50° N), a lot of these solar panels are in the perfect position to reflect sunlight up to the satellite. But, not all of them. Some solar panels track the sun and move throughout the day. Other panels are fixed in place and don’t move. Only the solar panels in the right orientation relative to the satellite and the sun will be visible to VIIRS.

At these latitudes during the day, the sun is always to south and slightly to the west of the satellite. For the most part, solar panels to the east of the satellite will reflect light away from the satellite, which is why you don’t see any of those. If the panel is pointed too close to the horizon, or too close to zenith (or the sun is too high or too low in the sky), the sunlight will be reflected behind or ahead of the satellite and won’t be seen. You could say that this “sparkle” is actually another form of glint, like sun glint or moon glint – only this is “solar panel glint”.

Here’s a Natural Color image from the very next day (10 March 2015), when the satellite was a little bit further east and overhead a little bit earlier in the day:

VIIRS Natural Color RGB composite of channels M-5, M-7 and M-10 from 11:35 UTC 10 March 2015.

Notice the half-dozen-or-so bright spots over the Czech Republic. These are just west of the satellite track and in the same position relative to satellite and sun. (The bright spot near the borders of Austria and Slovakia matches up with this solar farm.) The bright spots over Germany are gone because they no longer line up with the sun and satellite geometry.

As for the pastel colors in the Natural Color and Fire Temperature RGBs, those are related to the proportional surface area of the solar panels relative to the size of each pixel as well as the background reflectivity of the ground surrounding the solar panels. The bright spots do generally appear more white in the high-resolution version of the Natural Color RGB from 9 March:

VIIRS high-resolution Natural Color (I-01, I-02, I-03) RGB image (11:54 UTC 9 March 2015).

See, we learned something today. Germany sparkles with green electricity and VIIRS can see it!

UPDATES (17 March 2015): Thanks to feedback from Renate B., who grew up in Bavaria and currently owns solar panels, we have this additional information: there is a push to add solar panels onto church roofs throughout Bavaria, since they tend to be the tallest buildings in town (not shaded by anything) and are typically positioned facing east, so the south-facing roof slopes are ideal for collecting sunlight. The hurdle is that churches are protected historical buildings that people don’t want to be damaged. Also, it’s not a coincidence that many solar parks have their solar panels facing southeast (and align with the VIIRS scan direction). They are more efficient at producing electricity in the morning, when the temperatures are lower, than they are in the afternoon when the panels are warmer. They face southeast to better capture the morning sun.

Also, to clarify (as pointed out by Ed S.): the solar power plant that incinerates birds generates electricity from a different mechanism than the photovoltaic (PV) arrays seen in these images from Germany. PV arrays (aka solar parks) convert direct sunlight to electricity. The “bird incinerator” uses a large array of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower filled with water. The focused sunlight heats the water until it boils, generating steam that powers a turbine. Solar parks and solar panels on houses and churches do not cause birds to burst into flames.

JPSS (SNPP and NOAA-20)

VIIRS Imagery and Visualization Team Blog

Tag Archives: M-5

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Germany’s Magic Sparkle