Triple Treat: Lessons Learned from Watching Fires with the GOES-16, GOES-18, and GOES-19 ABIs

When one of the current series of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellites is launched, it is put through a months-long post launch test (PLT) at 89.5° W before moving to the GOES-East or GOES-West orbital position. Due to the issues with GOES-17, GOES-18 didn’t spend much time there during its PLT, but GOES-19 did. This provided an opportunity to observe fires with three Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABIs) simultaneously from three widely-separated locations. While this wasn’t the first time fires were observed with three different widely-separated geostationary weather satellites at once, it was the first time three modern geostationary imagers could perform those observations of the same fires. With the rapidly increasing importance of fire detection and monitoring by geostationary satellites the need to understand what the satellite is seeing and why it sees the fire that way has grown. Cases from this “triple treat” period will be presented which address topics including but not limited to correlating fire radiative power (FRP) between the platforms, assessing the accuracy of the recently-developed terrain correction applied to GOES data, and fire detectability from different viewpoints considering terrain and other factors. Understanding the similarities and differences in FRP records as well as when fires can and cannot be seen by different platforms in different locations is critical for integration into smoke forecasts and fire progression models. These examples are also very useful for training the “humans in the loop” as various fire intelligence systems have been under development, systems that fuse together disparate sources of data in a timely manner for use in firefighting efforts.