Satellites keeping busy with this week's severe weather

Red Orbit: Satellites have been busy this week covering severe weather across the U.S. Today, the GOES-13 satellite and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the huge stretch of clouds associated with a huge and soggy cold front as it continues its slow march eastward. Earlier this week, NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite captured images of severe weather that generated tornadoes over Louisiana.

Today the eastern third of the U.S. is being buffered by a large storm that stretches from southeastern Minnesota east to Wisconsin and Michigan, then south through the Ohio Valley and all the way down to eastern Louisiana. That massive storm system was captured in an image by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13.

GOES satellites are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. creates some of the GOES satellite images and animations.

Dennis Chesters, a GOES Project scientist at NASA Goddard, noted "The wide angle view provided by GOES reveals that the on-shore flow from the Gulf is part of a much larger oceanic circulation centered east of the Bahamas. That is driving a nearly unlimited supply of warm moisture over the eastern U.S. from as far south as Jamaica. With all that energy to work with, the wall of condensation and rainfall at the front pushed convective towers up to the stratosphere, which cast long shadows into the dawn behind the storm."…

A fulldisk of the earth on September 3, 2010 by GOES-13 satellite