11-20-2008

Jim G.
Plans for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R Series:

A New Era in Environmental Monitoring

James J. Gurka

NOAA/NESDIS

The first step to improving forecasts of environmental hazards including severe weather and space weather events, is to improve detection of both the phenomena and the antecedent conditions leading to the event. The baseline instruments for the GOES-R series, including the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), the Space Environment in-situ Suite (SEISS), the Solar Ultra-Violet Imager (SUVI) and the Extreme Ultraviolet and X-Ray Irradiance Sensor (EXIS) are designed to provide dramatic improvements to that first critical step. The ABI will improve upon the current GOES Imager with more spectral bands, faster imaging, higher spatial resolution, better navigation, and more accurate calibration.

The ABI expands from five spectral bands on the current GOES imagers to a total of 16 spectral bands in the visible, near-infrared and infrared spectral regions. There will be an increase of the coverage rate leading to full disk scans at least every 15 minutes. ABI spatial resolution will be 2 km for the infrared (IR) bands and 0.5 km for the 0.64 um visible band. The ABI will improve every product from the current GOES Imager and will introduce a host of new products.

The new GOES-R Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) is a single channel, near-IR transient detector that will continuously measure total lightning activity with near-uniform spatial resolution of 8-12 km over the full-disk. The GLM will detect total lightning flash rate and changes in flash rate over both land and water. Total lightning activity is related to the updraft strength and the amount of ice in the mixed phase region of thunderstorms. By monitoring lightning frequency, one can infer storm kinematics and microphysical structure and, therefore, changes in storm severity.

The solar instruments and the SEISS, to monitor the highly-variable solar and near-Earth space environment continue a long history of space weather observations from the GOES. These observations are used to protect life and property of those sensitive to solar and space weather fluctuations. The expanded services from GOES-R will improve support to forecasters at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), customers in other government agencies, such as the Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); commercial users of space weather services and international space environment services.

The ABI together with GLM will offer the promise of improving the observation and forecasting of virtually every type of hazardous weather event. The anticipated improvements in water vapor and cloud drift winds alone should provide significant improvements to Numerical Weather Prediction performance thereby improving the forecasts of all types of weather events. The ABI, with its additional channels, improved spatial resolution and temporal refresh, together with the GLM will be an especially powerful team for improving aviation forecasts. Substantial improvements in detection and forecasting of volcanic ash plumes, low clouds and fog, convection and hazardous winds can be expected.

This presentation will describe the expected new capabilities of GOES-R and how these will translate to improved weather forecasts and service to the user communities.