Advances in Stereo Winds

Recent NASA-NOAA collaborations have developed stereo methods to observe winds benefiting from the high-accuracy Image Navigation and Registration of modern satellites. Stereo methods allow for the direct assignment of wind height with the expectation that geometric height assignments are more reliable and accurate than those inferred from IR brightness temperatures and modeled thermodynamics. The stereo method has been applied to pairs of Geostationary (GEO) satellites and a GEO paired with a Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) sensor. Stereo pairings within the GOES/Himawari constellation and pairings between GOES/Himawari and VIIRS are on track to become part of the future suite of NOAA operational wind products. Recent work has also applied the stereo method to pairs of polar orbiting LEO satellites to extend stereo coverage into the polar regions. In this paper, we report on these new developments and show validations against LiDAR, fixed ground sites, and forecast/reanalysis datasets. We show the versatility of the method to work with volcanic and wildfire smoke plumes and examine the ability to observe the vertical evolution of cloud structures, which has potential impacts for the study/forecasting of severe storms.