Interesting and Educational Things We Can See in GOES Imagery

On any given day the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the current Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) series captures a large number of things on the ground and in the air which not only play a crucial role in weather forecasting and monitoring, but also capture interesting events and processes. While ABI didn’t see any large, suspect balloons as they transited the United States, it has observed newsworthy and interesting events like rocket launches, volcanoes, flooding, the scintillating reflections of solar farms, the 2017 solar eclipse, subtle and dramatic dynamic processes in the atmosphere, fires wild, prescribed, and structural, and more. We can see how the clouds change as an eclipse moves across the landscape. The intense heat of volcanic eruptions such as the recent ones in Hawaii. The remarkable number of solar farms in unexpected places, like Minnesota, which reflects the availability of a program that underwrites their construction. We can see and sometimes even locate down to the farm or nature preserve the prescribed burns that can have a regional effect on daily life. We can see massive dust clouds rolling across the plains. Sometimes these interesting and educational things are easy to see in basic imagery, other times they require an algorithm and/or some extra information and interpretation to identify. This presentation will examine a range of examples that could be useful for educating and entertaining the public.