Sorry with my preoccupation with cold pools and the life-cycles of convection, but I am a bit hooked on the GOES imagery. When I went to look at today’s imagery there was a beautiful circular line of clouds somewhere near the NTAS buoy, and so I thought maybe I could hunt back in time in IR imagery to see its origins. The result of the hunt is attached. The thing that fascinated me was the amount of time this theatre played over. The convection was deepest around 7 hours before the image that led to the wonderful circle, and even then it took a few hours to develop into what it finally was.

So even for the shallow convection we see systems evolving coherently on time scales that stretch over many many hours, and you see that in the end the size of the cold pool ring is about 200 km.

Don’t worry, Louise is on tomorrow and that will give me an idea for something else to rattle along about.