Tim Schmit - On the Evolution of the GOES Satellites

0:00GOES started with working with NASA back in the late ?60?s. In 1966 NASA was going
0:07to put up a communications satellite into geostationary orbit and Dr. Vern Suomi of
0:13the University of Wisconsin-Madison said, ?well you need to put a camera on that??a
0:18cloud camera, if you will, to watch the evolution of the clouds features. So that started the
0:22whole GOES world: December 6, 1966. So the first camera that we had in 1966 was just
0:31a visible channel, which is great if you?re looking at clouds for example during the day,
0:37but the world would then go dark at night. Then we evolved the system to have infrared,
0:43or the heat of the radiating surface, and then we evolved to more and more spectral
0:49bands or frequencies to look at different layers in the atmosphere. And now we can use
0:57that information to better observe the Earth-atmosphere system and use that to initialize or start
1:03the initial fields for numerical models or predictions of what?s going to happen. The
1:08idea is that you can?t very well predict what?s going to happen in the atmosphere
1:12if you don?t have a good idea what?s happening right now. So the geostationary data is not
1:17just used for the imagery that you see on the evening news, that the hurricane center
1:22uses, but also for many quantitative products. The most exciting part for me to GOES-R is
1:27just these rapid images. Today we have this conflict: do we want to scan a kind of a regional
1:35or hemispheric view or a mesoscale view? But with GOES-R we?ll be able to do both. So
1:43we?ll be able to make full-disk images say every 15 minutes, looking at the Continental
1:48United States every 5 minutes, but these small areas ? 1,000 by 1,000 kilometers ? we?ll
1:52be able to look at one spot every 30 seconds, or if there are two regions of interest we
1:58can look at them both for every one minute. So then we can see not just what has happened,
2:03which is kind of the world we?re in now with 15 minute or 30 minute data, but really
2:07while its happening? while the eye is swirling?while the convection is forming. So its really the
2:13temporal resolution. The GOES serves really the whole hemisphere and so right now we?re
2:19in a case where we?re going to do rapid scan imaging over the Continental United States,
2:23then we don?t get those images in the southern hemisphere. But now with GOES-R, we?ll be
2:30able to do both of those. We don?t have to choose which would be more important: this
2:35hurricane or that dust storm. We?ll be able to monitor them both as we go on.