Tools for Last-Minute Solar Eclipse Cloud Avoidance Planning

A few websites that may be useful

6 Apr 2024

If—like me—you put your money on Texas being the clearest sky for April 8th total eclipse and are now sad that may not be true, here is a few webpages I plan on using to try and avoid the clouds as best we can:

NOAA GOES-East

  1. Day Cloud Phase / Night Microphysics
    This updates every 5 minutes and shows various types of clouds as false colour so you can understand what is above you. Some types of clouds (higher ones) have much less impact on eclipse visibility

    1 - Low level clouds with water droplets (cyan, lavender)
    2 - Glaciating clouds (green)
    3 - Snow (shades of green)
    4 - Thick high level clouds with ice particles (yellow)
    5 - Thin mid level clouds with water droplets (magenta)
    6 - Thin high-level clouds with ice particles (red-orange)
    7 - Land surface (shades of blue)
    8 - Water surface (black)

  2. CONUS - GeoColor
    This also updates every 5 minutes providing a “True Color” view of the path of totality. It can be useful to see what is coming, this view also allows toggling on a path of totality overlay right now—which is useful to planning you don’t leave the path. You will be able to see the shadow of the eclipse in this view as it passes over the the earth—albeit at five minute intervals.

  3. Mesoscale view - GeoColor
    This updates every minute making it very useful for realtime planning on the day, you will be able to see the shadow of the eclipse changing every minute. You will also be able to see the clouds changing every minute.

Windy

Windy shows the current direction and speed of wind in realtime, which is very useful when combined with maps of clouds to try and guess where the clouds might be going and how to avoid them.

Ventusky

A friend also sent me Ventusky which is very similar to Windy, but is predicting slightly different cloud coverage right now. Segal’s Law etc etc


This post was previously titled “Some Resources for Last Minute Eclipse Cloud Planning” but it sounded too much like SEO spam for Eclipse Cloud

This post was last updated on 07 Apr 2024