Salinity Front Intensity
ProWhere the forecast salinity changes fastest across the map — the edges and rips, not the values. Brighter is a sharper change within that day's picture, so use it to find the line, not to measure it.
Updates daily; forecast in 3-hour steps
More detail
What you see. A dark map with bright bands and threads. A bright band is a salinity edge: the place where fresher water, such as a river plume, meets salty blue water. The color runs on a 0-to-1 scale with no units, and the scale is rebuilt for every frame.
How to use it. Find the band, then switch to Sea Surface Salinity to see the values on each side of it. A band that holds its place across several frames and days counts for more. In Layer Settings you can change the Colormap and the Opacity.
How it relates to the other front layers. Salinity Front Edges comes from the same calculation and draws only thin lines. Use Salinity Front Intensity to see how strong and how wide a change is, and Salinity Front Edges to see only where the lines are. On a flat day this layer still paints something, while Salinity Front Edges can come up empty. There is a pair like this for four things: SST Front Intensity and SST Front Edges for temperature, Salinity Front Intensity and Salinity Front Edges for salinity, Chlorophyll Front Intensity and Chlorophyll Front Edges for chlorophyll, and Phytoplankton Front Intensity and Phytoplankton Front Edges for plant plankton. All eight are worked out from a forecast or a model, so none of them has cloud gaps. The only front layers made from satellite pictures are SST (ACSPO) Fronts and SST (GOES-19) Fronts, and both are for temperature.
Who makes it. RipIQ makes this layer itself from the forecast surface salinity of HYCOM (U.S. Navy model), the Sea Surface Salinity layer. The layer covers the Gulf of America, the East Coast and Baja.
Its limits. It is blank within about 2.5 nautical miles of land. A hard edge you ran over may not show. The forecast behind it has about 5 nautical miles of real detail, so read it as a broad zone. There are eight frames a day, three hours apart. The newest frame is from a run started between one and four days ago, and the time slider reaches up to 7 days ahead as a forecast.
The numbers
| How often it updates | 8 frames a day, three hours apart |
| How fresh it usually is | The newest frame is from a run started between one and four days ago |
| How detailed it is | The forecast behind it has about 5 nautical miles of real detail |
| Where it covers | Gulf of America, East Coast and Baja, minus a band of about 2.5 nautical miles along every coast |
| How far back you can look | 8 days back |
| How far forward you can look | Up to 7 days ahead, as a forecast |
| Goes blank under cloud? | Never |
| Observed or modeled | Calculated by RipIQ from HYCOM (U.S. Navy model) |
| What you see on screen | A 0-to-1 scale with no units. It is a ranking within that one frame |
Source: computed by RipIQ from Sea Surface Salinity (HYCOM model).