The HES Coastal Waters Imaging Function (HES-CW) will cover the US navigable waterways, including coastal water-ways along with rivers and lakes, nominally every three hours. HES-CW will have hyperspectral coverage from 0.4 to 1.0 um in at least 14 selectable spectral bands and sample at 300 meter resolution. HES-CW is still evolving but it is anticipated that it will provide valuable coverage of the properties of the coastal and shelf waters with the rapid update afforded by a geosynchronous platform. The high temporal and spatial resolution data from HES-CW will uniquely fill an existing gap in the time-space domain of available visible - near infrared observations obtained from space-borne sensors, and strengthen our ability to detect, monitor, quantify, and predict short-term events and processes of the earth's surface and atmosphere. These data will permit the investigation of processes of the dynamic coastal ocean, such as tidal mixing, as well as the study and tracking of ephemeral events found there, such as harmful algal blooms (HABs). When used together with data from polar orbiters, they will permit the investigation of processes not possible with either platform alone. More frequent measurements will also effectively increase the number of cloud-free observations in a region of broken clouds through cloud filtering and compositing of multiple images. These attributes will strengthen our ability to appraise local conditions and predict short-term events.