Utility of Gravity Wave Regions Identified in GOES Water Vapor Imagery for Verifying Turbulence Forecasts

The detection of gravity wave packets in high-resolution water vapor imagery from the new Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) and their potential connection to turbulence presents the possibility of turbulence observations that are not dependent on pilot behavior (e.g. attempts to deviate around areas of suspected turbulence). Correlating waves in water vapor imagery to observations of turbulence would yield a new data set robust in both space and time. The waves are readily seen in water vapor imagery and image processing is capable of automating the identification of these regions. This talk explores of the utility of these data to supplement PIREP and EDR turbulence observations. Satellite observation data was collected from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS), which included identified gravity waves. The results quantify the performance of the gravity wave identification algorithm and discuss the utility of this dataset and technique in the verification of turbulence forecasts.