Automated Tasking Tool for Optimal Placement of GOES-R ABI Mesoscale Sectors

The GOES-R series is the latest generation of geostationary satellites. The Advanced Baseline Imager instrument on each GOES-R satellite has the ability to provide 1-minute imagery scans using mesoscale domain sectors, which are 1,000 km by 1,000 km regions that can be moved anywhere within the instrument’s field of view. Currently, the sectors remain in their default locations until a request is made to observe a meteorological event. The goal is to develop a tool that can provide automated guidance to locate the most ideal placement of the sectors throughout the day. The first prototype of this algorithm ingests daily outlook sources from national forecast centers and prioritizes the meteorological events using an existing mesoscale domain sector priority list. These sources are combined onto a single heatmap and processed to identify the optimal placement of the sectors for each day. Progress has been made to create a temporally dynamic plan-of-day by ingesting models and other hourly forecast sources. Eventually, the tool will create a 24 hour tasking list that can be used as guidance for the sectors to be moved occasionally throughout the day, while also balancing the forecasters’ need to keep a sector in a single location for multiple hours. The next steps will be to implement more hourly signals and begin testing the success of the algorithm by comparing its automated guidance for sector placements against the current manually requested placement of the sectors. With the development of this tool, the mesoscale domain sectors can be used more frequently to help advance meteorological research and forecasting.