Highlights of the First Year of GOES-16 Imagery

The first data from GOES-16’s Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) arrived approximately 1 year ago - the first light imagery was debuted on the Monday of the 2017 AMS Annual Meeting in Seattle. Researchers have worked during the past year to examine the data, fix problems, create new algorithms, and generate a tremendous amount of imagery that has been shared widely with both forecasters and the public. Our expectations for the quality of the imagery were very high, but the ABI imagery has nonetheless managed to exceed those very lofty expectations.

This presentation will provide highlights of the first year of ABI on-orbit using animations covering a variety of high impact weather events, including tropical cyclones, tornadic supercells, wildfires, and blowing dust, among others. We will focus on showing examples of weather events and phenomena that we never expected to be able to observe with GOES-16, such as the mid-level storm-scale rotation of a supercell thunderstorm. Operational applications will also be highlighted, and means of communicating the information from the satellite to the public will be discussed.