NASA’s TRMM Satellite is providing meteorologist with a lot of unique opportunities to study tropical rainfall rates, and tropical cyclones. TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) has an on-board radar that can scan storms with incredible accuracy from space.

Last month USA Today reported that Five U.S. Patent and Trade Office patent applications, made public on July 9, propose slowing hurricanes by pumping cold, deep-ocean water in their paths from barges. If issued, the patents offer 18 years of legal rights to the idea for Gates and co-inventors, including climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

The GOES-14 (GOES-O) satellite was launched on 27 June 2009, and is undergoing its Post Launch Test. The first calibrated full disk visible image (above) was received by the SSEC Data Center beginning at 17:30 UTC on 27 July 2009.

Over the past decade a lot of technological innovations has changed the way we chase storms. While I still consider ham radio communications to be an extremely important part of my chase rig for emergency communications, I no longer depend on my ICOM dual-band radio as much as I did just five storm seasons ago.

Whether your a seasoned storm chaser, or someone who just wants to keep tabs on the latest surface observations, chances are that you’ll find the new stormchase.mobi a useful tool for your hand held mobile platform.

Sirius|XM posted the company’s fourth quarter and full year results today with a pro forma adjusted income of $32 million (compared to a $224M loss of a year ago), making it the first time in the company’s history that it has reported a gain instead of a loss.

StormWiki is sort of like a giant science related social experiment – it has been created to collect the knowledge of its authors for the learning experience of its readers. Its authors can be anyone – perhaps you might decide to write an article on a topic related to severe weather and that you know something about.

FaceBook is a popular social media website, and websites can’t chase storms – but FaceBook might just own hundreds of storm chasers photographs. If you judge chasers by the amount of photos they have collected – FaceBook would have to be at the top of the list.

Baron Services has released an update to the Mobile Threat Net system. The new version includes these updates/fixes:

Before you go and update your XM Weather subscription, you might want to keep on eye on the techie news today concerning Sirius/XM and their possibly bankruptcy filing.

If satellite radio died in the woods would anyone be around to hear it? The answer is going to have to wait!

Recently a few new services have been made available for live streaming video, and some of them are offering special deals for tour operators.

Google just released a new service called Google Latitude that allows people to keep track of one another using their mobile phone, or PC. The service appears to be a play upon popular microblogging services such as Twitter, but with more functionality.

We just completed the addition of a new nowcasting area on stormchase.com. Visitors can now look over the Convective Outlooks along with the text, view up-to-date Doppler radar from sites all over Tornado Alley as well as retrieve live surface observations and IR satellite imagery. All course this information can be found on The Storm Prediction Center’s website and other NOAA websites, but its kind of convienent to have it all on a single page with an easy layout.

I’m pleased to announce the long anticipated launch of the all new StormChase.com (at least long anticipated by me). StormChase.com is a work still in development and as the content grows the site itself will likely undergo some major overhauls. This blog however will likely be the most updated part of the website and I’ve invited several friends to blog here as well.