GOES-R Education Proving Ground

The GOES-R Education Proving Ground (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/education/goesr/) features the design and development of pre-launch lesson plans and activities for G6-12 teachers and students to ensure that the education community will be “launch ready” for new satellite imagery and improved products that will be available in the upcoming GOES-R era.

A key element of this effort is a core group of educators working with Education and Outreach staff at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) in close coordination NOAA scientists at the Advanced Satellite Products Branch (ASPB) and members of GOES-R Algorithm Working Group and Risk Reduction programs at CIMSS.

Currently six teachers are collaborating on the GOES-R Education Proving Ground, three teams of two teachers from three different states: Wisconsin, New Jersey and Florida. Each team developed a GOES-R related lesson plan for middle and high school students during the 2013-14 school year. The Wisconsin team focused on the advantages of the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), Florida highlighted the Global Lightning Mapper (GLM)and New Jersey emphasized STEM connections to GOES-R. All lesson plans link content to the Next Generation Science Standards, and all six educators presented at the 2014 Satellites and Education Conference in Madison.

Additionally, scientists from ASPB have teamed up with CIMSS researchers to develop Next-Generation WebApps (http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/goes/applets/overview.html) that enables exploration of time and spatial resolutions on satellite image interpretation. The user can change the 'sampling rate' of the animation, as well as the 'pixel size'. The phenomena available for exploration include: hurricanes, convection, fires, clouds, pyrocumulus, and smoke. These WebApps use special high-time resolution Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-14) Imager data which was operated in a mode to emulate the improved temporal resolution possible on the ABI scheduled to fly on the GOES-R satellite.