Sky Cover during the 2017 Solar Eclipse

On 21 August 2017, many intrigued people headed outside to catch a view of a rare solar eclipse over North America. Successful eclipse viewing requires finding a location void of cloud cover. This presentation will discuss sky cover over the Tennessee Valley during the 2017 solar eclipse, and how National Weather Service (NWS) short-term forecasts did not capture the observed evolution of the diurnal cumulus field. To evaluate the performance of the NWS forecasts, imagery from Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) is used and compared to surface observations. A comparison between GOES-13 and GOES-16 is also conducted. Sky cover continues to remain difficult to quantify, and, due to its limited importance for general public interests, is often not well analyzed or forecast. With the GOES R-Series, there is room for improvement prior to the next North American solar eclipse on 8 April 2024.