From True Color to GeoColor and Beyond: Advanced Concepts Enabling Situational and Hazard Awareness via Imagery

True Color imagery is a special class of red-green-blue (RGB) composite that combines red-, green- and blue-wavelength visible channels into the red, green and blue components of an RGB image. It is the most intuitive form of multispectral imagery - similar to a color photograph taken with a digital camera - and provides much more information than viewing monochromatic visible imagery. An advanced form of multispectral imagery developed at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), GeoColor, combines True Color imagery during the day with multiple layers of information at night, including a background land surface mask with city lights, a low cloud mask and a high-cloud mask to create a single imagery product useful for scene characterization both day and night. Informal surveys of National Weather Service forecasters and statistics collected from users of NOAA’s GOES-East/West Imagery Viewer (https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/index.php) indicate that GeoColor is one of the most popular products of the GOES-R era. GeoColor is also widely used by the media to inform the general public of high-impact weather events such as tropical cyclones and wildfires. Recent advancements have been developed within the GeoColor framework to include additional layers of information to improve situational awareness for more-tailored nowcasting/forecasting applications. For example, to overcome limitations with the original low cloud mask within GeoColor, CIRA’s ProxyVis imagery product is substituted over ocean areas to create GeoProxy. GeoProxy is shown to improve low cloud detection at night and is particularly useful for monitoring the early stages of tropical cyclone development. NOAA’s Advanced Clear-Sky Processor for Oceans (ACSPO) Sea Surface Temperature (SST) retrieval product is blended into GeoColor to create GeoSST, which is useful for both tropical and extra-tropical cyclone forecasting. The Dynamic Enhanced Background Reduction Algorithm (DEBRA) Dust detection algorithm is blended within GeoColor to create GeoDEBRA, which aids dust detection over land surfaces. The Fire Temperature RGB is blended into GeoColor to create GeoFire to aid in fire detection and characterization. And, CIRA’s Snow/Cloud-Layers product is used to create a snow mask that is blended into GeoColor to track snow at night. This product, called GeoSnow, is expected to benefit short-term temperature forecasts and highlight the role that snow may play in nighttime boundary layer cloud production, including fog. This talk will provide a review of how CIRA researchers have optimized True Color capability from the current generation of geostationary satellites, developed Synthetic True Color for the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) - which is lacking a green-wavelength visible band - and introduce the GeoColor concept. Then, we will introduce the new Advanced GeoColor variations outlined above and discuss the specific benefits these new products provide for situational awareness and the detection/monitoring of environmental hazards.