The Art and Beauty of GOES-16 Images

NOAA should learn the lesson from the Hubble telescope program that the art and beauty of satellite images can greatly increase public awareness (and funding) for your program. The Hubble program has been transformed from a failing program with design mistakes into one of NASA's most well known and supported programs. The raw Hubble images are black and white images of various spectral bands which by themselves are rather uninteresting. What NASA did to gather public awareness of their program was to combine the various spectral images into beautiful images of the heavens. For instance, the famous image of “Pillars of Creation” was created using three images centered on the spectral bands of oxygen (blue gun), hydrogen (green gun), and sulfur (red gun). If one would just look through a telescope at the dust clouds of the “Pillars” they would not see the image as shown by NASA. They would see the oxygen band with a greenish tint and the other two bands as red. The “false color” combination of three black and white images (as opposed to “true color” of three bands naturally in the red, green, and blue portions of the spectrum) can be used to create images which highlight differences in brightness between the three bands via colors. While the “false color” technique has been used by many groups since the development of color displays, what NASA did was to utilize the technique to show science using artistic rendering of light and colors. NASA and ESA employ graphic artists to help generate the Hubble images, but they also have contests open to the public for Hubble images as art. Releasing artistically pleasing Hubble images to the public has greatly increased public support for the Hubble and other space astronomy programs.

When NOAA was having meetings of scientists 15 to 20 years ago to determine the requirements for the various channels for the new GOES-R series of satellites, NOAA insisted that each new channel be required for some scientific purpose. When a green channel was suggested so that natural color satellite images could be shown to the public, NOAA's reaction was that they would not spend money just for the sake of making “neat” looking images. After much discussion, the current 16 channels for the GOES-R were implemented. NOAA then formed working groups for the development of scientific products from the GOES channels. Twenty five baseline products were developed to be ready on day one of the GOES-16 operations, and another 30 products were specified to be developed in the future. Natural color images of the Earth were not included in any of the 55 products supported by NOAA. When the GOES-16 was first launched, the first image released on Jan. 15, 2017 was a natural color image, not one of the sponsored products. If one goes to the NOAA or NWS web server for GOES satellite images, one can see any of the 16 individual bands (some with color enhancements applied to show features) and a geo-color image. The green channel has been constructed by blending the near infrared “vegge” channel with the blue and red channels. Not any of the 55 NOAA sponsored product images are made available to the public on the NOAA web pages. The official products are generated by NOAA and sent to the NWS forecasters via the NOAAPort communications. A few of the NOAAPort GOES products are made available on the web by other organizations.

While most of the product development efforts terminated with the end of the GOES-R development funding, there are still several groups actively working on new GOES products. One such group is at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) with the web page of http://wx.erau.edu/erau_sat/.

New products include a new day/night visible color image, a new three channel water vapor image, a new smoke detection image, a new ash/dust detection image, and a new convective product with overlays of the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) data. The attached image shows the three channel water vapor image for the eastern US. The image is generated by sending the highest water vapor channel (band 8) to the blue gun, the middle water vapor channel (band 9) to the green gun, and the lowest water vapor channel (band 10) to the red. If the image is dark blue, there is only high level moisture. If the image is cyan there is a deep water vapor layer. If the image shows some redish or brownish areas, these are lower (generally the tops of mid level clouds) in the atmosphere.

NOAA is missing out on possible public relations good will by not releasing the GOES derived products on the web. NOAA should also try to generate and release beautiful products, not just scientific products. NOAA should encourage outside groups to develop new, better, and prettier products from the GOES satellites, and to eventually implement these new products into a public web server. NOAA should encourage artistic competition to improve the artistic quality of the GOES satellite images.