Student Research Reports

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When researching GOES-16, there were a lot of readily available resources. One, in particular, was a fact sheet from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/OCLOFactSheetPDFs/). Based on review of this fact sheet, the research team decided to compare Brightness Temperature (BT) with amount of precipitation collected in a 24-hr period. The research question developed was, “What is the correlation between GOES-16 ABI Band 13 data and the amount of precipitation collected using a metric rain gauge?” The rain gauge data was collected in Medford, NJ 08055 over a four-week period. ABI Band 13 data was retrieved from the RAMMB Slider site. About ¾ of the way through the research window, the team realized there was no correlation between amount of precipitation and BT. The team asked for help from Dr. Tim Schmit, CIMSS, NOAA and Dr. Dan Lindsey, NOAA. It was suggested that instead of looking at amount of precipitation, it would better to check BT as the rain was occurring. This required the team to go back and use archived precipitation data for Medford (https://www.wunderground.com) to get the approximate times when rain occurred. This information was then checked against GOES-16 ABI Band 13 data. Three GOES images were saved for each day: one at 1300 UTC, 1800 UTC, and one at 2300 UTC, unless it rained. If it was actively raining, the images used were three hours before the rain, in the beginning of the rain, the middle of the rain, at the end, and three hours after. There seems to be a correlation between Band 13 data and the timing of precipitation events. A recommendation to future CSEP junior scientists is to redo the research with the new research question and check Brightness Temperature as the rain is occurring.