Ten Year Climatology of CAPE Observations East of the Rocky Mountains from Hyperspectral IR Sounders

High priority must be given to research for new remote sensing applications especially relating to severe weather. Extreme convective instability from remote sensing technologies should be incorporated into severe thunderstorm risk assessments. For example, a climatology of Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) is routinely used to characterize convection as having moderate or severe potential. Relating this climatology to near real time observations from meteorological sensors on weather satellites is going to be a valuable tool in assessing the risk of severe weather. Satellite data products from AQUA AIRS were used to compute a 10 year climatology for the region of the United States east of the Rockies. CAPE was computed from vertical profiles of pressure, temperature, and dew point temperature from high vertical resolution AIRS soundings (101 levels) using the SHARPpy algorithm. NWS forecasters could make use of CAPE estimates from operational satellite sounders such as CrIS and IASI on JPSS and METOP platforms two to four times a day. A goal of this project is to outline a path towards obtaining near-real time hyperspectral satellite soundings of temperature and water vapor from direct broadcast and making these data available to the NWS Storm Prediction Center (SPC) via the SHARPpy software. A climatology of CAPE on approximately 75 km scales east of the Rockies will be presented to demonstrate the usefulness of satellite remote sensing data in characterizing severe storms.