GOES-16: The Awesome Images and Products are Here

The 16^th satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-16) series continues and expands the decades-long GOES legacy. The new Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABIs) on GOES-16 and its successors are much improved in terms of temporal, spectral, and spatial resolution, providing imagery and derived product data over thunderstorms, hurricanes, and other events as rapidly as every 30 seconds. GOES-16 launched on November 19, 2016 and two months later data from ABI began to flow. Shortly thereafter the algorithm teams responsible for derived products began assessing and tuning their algorithms as part of a validation process scheduled to take up to a year. Imagery and some experimental product data were available to be released to the public by spring. GOES-16 sees three times as many wavelengths at four times the spatial resolution and five times faster than the current operational GOES, which today run a series of imagers first launched in 1994. The additional wavelengths and higher resolution in time and space allow for better monitoring of severe storms, water vapor, dust and aerosols, and so on. Derived products such as cloud properties and masks, satellite-derived winds, fire detection, and simulated natural color imagery are also being produced. Examples of “gee-whiz” imagery and animations from GOES-16 and derived products (to the extent possible at the time of the conference) will be showcased, and the science behind the imagery discussed.

Supplementary URL: http://www.goes-r.gov/