This is a false-color, derived image of total precipitable water obtained from GOES-8 imagery. White indicates water vapor in a deep layer, clouds are rendered black, other hues designate water vapor at different heights.
This is a national scale image remapped to the FSL-conus grid, a Lambert grid with approximately 5 km spacing with at tangent latitude of 25 degrees and a pole longitude of 95 degrees west. Information on remapping GOES image data can be found on the web! (See NOAA technical report NESDIS-82: An Introduction to the Goes I-M Imager and Sounder Instruments and the GVAR Retransmission Format). In addition, the details of GOES Navigation are explained in other places. The training set paired about 600 clear pixels extending from east Texas to New York with integrated precipitable water derived from RUC data.
Four GOES-8 IR images (3.9, 6.7, 10.7, and 12 micometer wavelength channels) acquired at FSL's local groundstation were regressed against each level of integrated moisture. The regression coefficients were then applied to all pixels and the different layers assigned different gun colors: Red=low level, green=mid level, and blue=upper level moisture.
The date of this picture is 18 July 1995 at 2230 UTC. It is a ``monsoon'' day and you can see the deep moisture over the western US. The swirl south of TX is also very interesting in that you can find the deepest moisture in the swirl and another region of deep moisture to its east. Up in the New England area you can see an interesting abrupt stop in the mid/upper moisture and we see a lot of reds (low level moisture only).
