How the GOES U Satellite Will Forever Change Weather Forecasts on Earth and in Space

I remember learning about weather forecasting in college in the late 2000s. My classmates and I hand-drew maps showing current weather systems and then we looked at the satellite data to paint a picture of what would happen in the coming hours and days.

NOAA's weather satellites were good back then, but compared to what we have in orbit now, the difference is night and day. As a radio meteorologist, I have used the data they provide to deliver life-saving information and advanced warnings to billions of people across the United States and even the Caribbean when threatening weather developed.

And when GOES-U launches atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on June 25, it will complete NOAA's GOES-R weather satellite constellation, expanding the capabilities of its siblings and bringing a greater focus on space weather.

NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) are not new; Since 1975, they have given scientists a steady stream of data and images from space. But over the decades, technological advances and the lessons learned from every satellite launched to date have helped significantly improve the instruments and products available with the newer models.

The most recent constellation of the GOES family began in November 2016 when the first satellite of four, GOES-R, was launched into space. At the time, I was working at KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara, California, and had the opportunity to curate an exclusive feature when preliminary data became available to scientists in the United States.

I interviewed the team of forecasters from the National Weather Service (NWS) Los Angeles office to find out how the variety of images and observations were useful in each of their different roles. The meteorologists shared how it was incorporated into their forecasts and used alerts to warn the public of bad weather, as well as how incredible it was compared to anything they had used before.

More than seven years later, as three of the series' four satellites orbit Earth, scientists and researchers say they are pleased with the results and that the advanced technology has been a game changer.

"I think it has really lived up to its hype in terms of thunderstorms. Meteorologists can see the convection evolving almost in real time and this gives them a better understanding of the storm's development and severity, providing better warnings," says John Cintineo, a researcher from NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) told Space.com in an email.

"The GOES-R series not only provides observations where radar coverage is lacking, but often provides a robust signal ahead of the radar, such as when a storm is strengthening or weakening. I'm sure there have been many more improvements in the forecasts and environmental monitoring over the past decade, but this is where I have seen the clearest improvement," Cintineo said.

In addition to helping forecast severe thunderstorms, each satellite has collected images and data on heavy rainstorms that can cause flooding, detect low clouds and fog as they form, and made significant improvements to the forecasts and services used during hurricane season.

"GOES provides our hurricane forecasters with faster, more accurate and detailed data critical to estimating a storm's intensity, including cloud cooling, convective structures, specific features of a hurricane's eye, upper level wind speeds and lightning activity," says Ken. Graham, director of NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS), told Space.com in an email.

Instruments like the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) has three times more spectral channels, four times the image quality and five times the frame rate of previous GOES satellites. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) is the first of its kind in orbit on the GOES-R series that allows scientists to see lightning and strikes making contact with the ground and cloud to cloud 24/7.

"GOES-U and the GOES-R series of satellites provide scientists and forecasters with weather monitoring of the entire Western Hemisphere, at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales," Cintineo said. "Data from these satellites will help researchers develop new tools and methods to tackle problems such as lightning forecasting, sea spray identification (sea spray is dangerous to mariners), severe weather warnings, and accurate cloud movement estimation. GOES-R's instruments will help also in improving global and regional numerical weather model forecasts, through improved data assimilation."

While similar to its siblings, GOES-U will be unique in that it features improvements to its instruments that came from what scientists learned from the three currently in orbit.

But what will set GOES-U apart from the others will be a new sensor on board, the Compact Coronagraph (CCOR), which will monitor the weather outside Earth's atmosphere and keep an eye on what space weather events are happening that could have an impact can have on our planet. .

"It will be the first near real-time operational coronagraph we have access to. That's a huge leap for us because until now we've always depended on a research coronagraph instrument on a spacecraft that was launched quite a long time ago. Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), told Space.com by phone.

"So this is exciting because I now don't have to wait for the data to be downloaded, because the current coronagraphy images are sometimes delayed. Sometimes we wait as long as four or eight hours, and every hour counts when you're dealing with coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that sometimes come to Earth and give us big geomagnetic storms like we had last month."