The advection is the measured wind speed at the airplane altitude at the time
of the satellite image. This wind speed (and wind direction) assumption
may not be exact as we frequently observe wind shear with often faster
wind speed towards the cloud top. However, as we consider the aircraft as
in-situ, this wind assumption should be pretty good.
For further information contact:
kinne@ice.arc.nasa.gov.
Flight tracks of the DC-8 and ER-2 plane are drawn on GOES-8 and GOES-9 imagery. The tracks are divided into 40 minute intervals centering at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour for the GOES data. There is a 10 minute overlap from one image to the next. If no data are available for a given time, the tracks are drawn on the nearest available hour image. These tracks are mostly drawn on the VIS data (channel 1), but for a few cases the IR data (channel 4) are used.
A brief description of the footer on each image is given below :
File names follow the convention: MMDDXXX.HHQ.gif where
MM is the month,
DD is the day of the month,
XXX is the aircraft (er2 or dc8),
HH is the hour, and
Q is the quarter past the hour (a = 15 minutes and b = 45 minutes).
Available data may be found in this list.