'ICECAP': A GOES image product depicting aircraft icing potential and maximum icing altitude

A new aircraft icing product from Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) data has been developed by combining a multi-spectral icing potential product from the Imager with cloud-top height data from the Sounder Cloud Top Pressure (CTP) product. The new combined product, known as ‘ICECAP’ (ICing Enhanced Cloud-top Altitude Product), shows potential icing regions color-coded with cloud top heights over the Continental United States (CONUS) at a resolution of 4 km. Non-icing areas use the latest gray-scale Infrared (IR) image as a background. The Imager icing product uses data from the visible channel, plus 4 km resolution IR bands centered at 3.9 and 10.7 micrometers to detect regions of super-cooled water clouds. At night, an IR-based product is available. The CTP information is derived using 10 km resolution data from several Sounder longwave IR bands. The ICECAP is produced each hour, using a composite of the past three products (covering a two hour period). The composite approach tends to smooth out unevenness caused by the temporal offsets in Imager/Sounder scans, provides better detection in areas of broken high level cloud cover, and alleviates poor icing detection during the day/night transitions. Heights are displayed in intervals of 3,000 ft. The latest verification statistics on the GOES Imager icing risk product and the CTP will be provided at the conference. Near-real time ICECAP images are now available on the following NOAA/NESDIS Web page: http://www.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/opdb/aviation/icg.html