Mother Nature’s springtime blizzard that dumped more than a foot of snow over an appetizer of freezing rain and ice encouraged me to spend the weekend indoors. Searching for some clue of how many more courses this banquet of wind and snow she would serve led me to the discovery of NOAA’s newest generation of weather satellites, GOES-R.
GOES is short for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite. When launched, the satellites are identified by letter, and GOES-R is not GOES-16, aka GOES East, because that is its geostationary perspective of the Western Hemisphere. GOES-S, the second of the four-satellite system that will provide a weather eye through 2036, reached its geostationary home at 22,300 miles above ground level in March 2018. GOES-17, aka GOES-West, is now undergoing testing and calibration, it will begin supplying imagery in May.
Compared to its predecessors, the new GOES collect three time more data, provide four times better resolution, and more than five times faster coverage (about every 30 seconds). Onboard is the first-ever geostationary lightning mapper; the GLM detects the flashes at the tops of clouds day and night and counts frequency, location, extent, and the total number of in-cloud and cloud-to-ground strikes, all critical cues to severe weather.
[Read more…] about GOES Gives HD Weather With Little Latency