Satellite Shows Major Winter Storm Hitting the U.S. South

Check out these surface grinding services images:

Satellite Shows Major Winter Storm Hitting the U.S. South


Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Clouds associated with the major winter storm that is bringing wintry precipitation and chilly temperatures to the U.S. south is the focus in an image from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite today, February 12 at 1310 UTC/ 8:10 EST.

Rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow are part of the large front that stretches from eastern Texas to the Carolinas in the Geostationary Operational Environmental satellite or GOES image. NOAA’s weather maps show several areas of low pressure along the frontal boundary. One low pressure is in the northern Gulf of Mexico, while the other is in the Atlantic Ocean, just south of South Carolina. (Insert link: www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/noaa/noaad1.gif).

NOAA’s National Weather Service has been issuing watches and warnings throughout the south that extend along Mid-Atlantic east coast.

The visible cloud and ground snow data in this image was taken from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite. The image was created by the NASA GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The clouds and fallen snow were overlaid on a true-color image of land and ocean created by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites.

NOAA’s Weather Prediction Center, or WPC noted on Feb. 11 at 3:59 a.m. EST, "Once the intensifying surface low moves off the Southeast coast and begins its track up the Eastern Seaboard Wednesday night…winter weather will start lifting northward into the northern Mid-Atlantic states."

GOES satellites provide the kind of continuous monitoring necessary for intensive data analysis. Geostationary describes an orbit in which a satellite is always in the same position with respect to the rotating Earth. This allows GOES to hover continuously over one position on Earth’s surface, appearing stationary. As a result, GOES provide a constant vigil for the atmospheric "triggers" for severe weather conditions such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms and hurricanes.

For updated information about the storm system, visit NOAA’s WPC website;

www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/

For more information about GOES satellites, visit:

www.goes.noaa.gov/ or goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Rob Gutro

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA image use policy.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

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New Satellite Movie Shows Massive Eastern U.S. Cool Down


Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Three days of satellite imagery from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite were compiled into an animation that showed the progression of the storm system that drastically changed temperatures in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern U.S. from spring-like warmth to the bitter cold of winter.

A powerful weather system moved from the central U.S. to the east coast from March 11 to March 13 making the shocking temperature change. Over the course of three days, Washington, D.C.’s daytime temperatures plummeted by over 40 degrees and brought wind chills in the teens on March 13.

The National Weather Service reported the high temperature at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. on March 11 hit 72. On March 12, the high topped out at 69 before a powerful cold front moved in. On March 13 at 12 p.m. EDT the airport reported 28F with northwesterly winds gusting to 37 mph. That made the wind chill feel like 13F at lunchtime. That’s a 59 degree difference from the way it felt in the city two days before.

Further north, the storm also brought snow with the gusty winds and generated Blizzard Warnings to Buffalo, N.Y. on March 12 where heavy snow fell totaling 13.8 inches. The National Weather Service in Buffalo reported the highest sustained wind speed was 36 mph, and highest winds gusted to 47 mph. According to the National Weather Service, Buffalo’s snowy winter has dropped 120.6 inches of snow, or 10 feet, 6 inches for the season.

In a short range public discussion, NOAA’s National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center in College Park Md. noted on March 13 at 4:33 a.m. EDT: Conditions will gradually clear out across the Northeast on Thursday as the winter storm that dumped over a foot of snow over interior New England tracks farther up the Eastern Seaboard. Strong northwesterly winds behind the storm will make for a blustery day across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States… but winds should begin to diminish and temperatures will start to rebound once the storm lifts into the Canadian Maritimes on Friday.

NOAA’s GOES-East satellite sits in a fixed orbit in space capturing visible and infrared imagery of all weather over the eastern U.S. and Atlantic Ocean.

Visible and infrared imagery from March 11 at 15:45 UTC/11:45 a.m. EDT to March 13 at 16:01 UTC/12:01 p.m. EDT captured by NOAA’s GOES-East or GOES-13 satellite were compiled into a 21 second video made by NASA/NOAA’s GOES Project at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

To create the video and imagery, NASA/NOAA’s GOES Project takes the cloud data from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite and overlays it on a true-color image of land and ocean created by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. Together, those data created the entire picture of the storm and show its movement. After the storm system passes, the snow on the ground becomes visible.

GOES satellites provide the kind of continuous monitoring necessary for intensive data analysis. Geostationary describes an orbit in which a satellite is always in the same position with respect to the rotating Earth. This allows GOES to hover continuously over one position on Earth’s surface, appearing stationary. As a result, GOES provide a constant vigil for the atmospheric "triggers" for severe weather conditions such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms and hurricanes.

For updated information about the storm system, visit NOAA’s NWS website: www.weather.gov

For more information about GOES satellites, visit: www.goes.noaa.gov/ or goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Rob Gutro

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

NASA image use policy.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

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Satellite Shows Major Winter Storm Hitting the U.S. South

Nuclear Winter in Chernobyl

A few nice custom machined parts China images I found:

Nuclear Winter in Chernobyl


Image by Stuck in Customs

HDR Pics – the most Popular Pictures you dig from my portfolio. Thanks again for the continued comments (good and bad).

Full story from the trip here – on the blog at Stuck In Customs

I spent the day in Chernobyl. One of my Kiev game dev friends hooked me up with a private tour, so I decided to go for the day to check it out. Every woman in my life told me this was a bad idea. Every man said it sounded awesome.

It was awesome, although I really usually fair better when I listen to the women.

Anyway, the day could not have been colder, but it fit with the milieu of the trip to Chernobyl. In case you don’t know or can’t remember, this is the infamous nuclear power plant that melted down in 1986; it was the worst nuclear plant disaster in the world.

I have taken a bunch of photos, but only had time to process a few of them. I’ll post more in coming weeks and months, but I have pieced these together that show a good sampling of the day.

After I made it through the 30KM security radiation zone, where Will was detained by the military for not having proper documentation (a longer story which ended with him sitting in a military bunker for four hours watching Colombo dubbed in Ukranian), I was handed over to a member of the military who took me on a personal tour of the area. We passed through the 10KM security radiation zone, and then we were well within the exclusion zone.

I paid one of the military guys and borrowed his geiger counter so I could keep track of the RADs as we moved around. More on that later.

First, we stopped in Pripyat, a fascinating place right out of the Day After. Pripyat was built as the ultimate Soviet communist panacea, a place for Chernobyl plant workers and their families to live, go to school, play, and live their lives in master-planned bliss.

Pripyat was immediately deserted after the accident – kids left schools with their books still on the desks, families rushed out without getting everything, just complete and instant desertion. While I was there, it was completely quiet, and it was extra surreal with the early 80′s styling of the Soviet buildings, windows ajar, stuff still sitting in all the windows.

First, from Pripyat, here was the shining star of the city, the fine hotel in its Russian splendor, now an empty, cold, and radiated husk.

Second is one of the large apartment buildings with a slowly rotting exterior. I could still hear shutters opening and closing in the wind.

Next, I went to the creepiest part of Pripyat, the playground and amusement park. This was recently completed just before the disaster. Bumper cars, swings, a ferris wheel, and other bits of abandoned toys now lay quiet and creaking in the snow. The second picture is another part of the playground, where the kids emerged from school for playtime.

We checked the Geiger counter because this area was supposed to still have a significant amount of caesium-137, which takes a good 300 years to dissipate to safe levels. It was around 0.054, so we decided to keep moving. Now we started heading for the main power plant complex. We stopped in something he called the RAD forest that had an old Chernobyl sign that was kitschy and interesting. 0.290 on the screen. He looked at me, "We should leave quickly."

Finally, I ended the the tour at the Chernobyl power plant itself. It was nerve-wracking, so I took a few shots then moved along.

On the way out, I went through three different radiation checks. Below is one of the military guys that was holding a geiger counter gun that he ran along the car and a few other things. I went inside to a special decontamination center and entered a device that looked like stripped down telephone booth / nautilus machine. I placed my hands and feet on special sensors. It said I was clean in some cyrillic word that may or may not have said I was clean. I looked at the military guy that escorted me in there and he gave me one of those Russian frowns and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Eh, good enough".

Gard Hollinger’s IlPazzo


Image by cliff1066™

The widespread notion of what a chopper looks like is Hollywood’s perpetuation of what was, essentially, a Southern California fashion statement made decades ago. The high tank and long-fork look got stuck in peoples’ minds thanks to a rash of wanton biker flicks from the ‘60s. Since then, however, the look of custom motorcycles has evolved from coast to coast and across the seas. Avant garde practitioners like Gard Hollinger have come up with many more interpretations of what “chopping” a motorcycle actually means. He coined the term retro-modernistic to describe his own style. Just as present-day musicians sample earlier recordings and embed snippets of tunes within contemporary compositions, Hollinger pays homage to older motorcycles by applying classical accents to radically engineered machines and using familiar parts in unfamiliar ways to emphasize their unconventional relationships with the rest of the bike. For instance, he will mount an automotive oil filter where you might expect to see a carburetor or fit a gas tank that looks like a lunch pail between a top tube and a motor mount. His goal is not to engineer machines agile enough to take on crotch rockets through twisty canyons; his bikes are made to turn heads, not corners. An art bike must still be roadworthy and reliable. “When you ride it, I want you to get a thrill,” says Hollinger, “I don’t want it to just be scary.”

Arlen Ness’ Untitled


Image by cliff1066™

People in the know call Arlen Ness “Godfather,” not because he makes offers you can’t refuse, but as a sign of respect for his accomplishments throughout a long and storied career. He is the patriarch of the custom motorcycle industry.

Back in “the day,” circa 1970 BC (Before Catalogs), when choppers were still the homespun products of some local dude with a torch, a hacksaw, a drill press, and a rattle can of flat black paint, Arlen Ness was going for baroque. He gold-plated parts, adorned the aluminum fascia of drive-train components with ornate engraving Chinas, and applied wild splashes of Peter Max-inspired color to the sheet metal. Plush, velour upholstery adorned his seats. If Arlen thought he could squeeze more than one motor into a frame, he would. It was nearly routine—at least for Arlen Ness—to cram two supercharged, Ironhead Sportster engines into a single frame where they would cuddle up to produce ungodly heaps of horsepower.

These eccentric-looking machines were hallmarks of early 1970s chopper style. Ness was one of the first builders to embrace the extravagant hippie counterculture that blossomed in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place Ness calls home. Some of his motorcycles from this period look like psychedelic props from a Jefferson Airplane album cover, or as if King Louis XIV of France had commissioned an eighteenth-century, rococo rocket sled to go tooling around the Palace of Versailles. Ness combined “flower power” with horsepower to create motorcycles that defined an era. He is still setting the pace for younger builders.

Nuclear Winter in Chernobyl