The GOES-17 drift to the GOES-West 137.2W position will begin on Wednesday, October 24. Information about the GOES-17 and GOES-15 drifts can be found here, with a more detailed schedule here. In this blog post, the drift is summarized with NWS folks in mind, so please refer to the linked pages for more details.

• GOES-15 (current GOES-West): drifting from 135W to 128W
  • Drift period: 10/29 – 11/7
  • Imagery will remain available before, during, and after the drift
• GOES-17 (Future GOES-West): drifting from 89.5W to 137.2W
  • Drift period: 10/24 – 11/13
  • Imagery not available: 1345 UTC on 10/24 through 11/14
  • Dataflow resumes on 11/15
  • GOES-17 is scheduled to become operational GOES-West on Dec 10
• Thereafter, GOES-15 and GOES-17 will operate in tandem for at least 6 months

Bill Line, NWS

By the morning of 10 October 2018, Hurricane Michael was a category 4 storm set to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle coast later in the day. GOES-16 had been providing 1-min satellite imagery over the storm during the days leading up to landfall, and collected 30-second imagery of the storm on the 10th to help support operations.

The VIS/IR sandwich product has been discussed in previous blog posts, and involves combining visible and IR imagery into one display to take advantage of both. The VIS provides high spatial detail, while the IR provides the quantitative brightness temperature information. In the past in AWIPS, users would overlay semi-transparent IR on the VIS to make this product. Recently, the OPG in collaboration with NWS created an RGB that combines the VIS and IR imagery into one. This allows for the high spatial detail of the VIS to show within the IR information noticeably better. The RGB is currently being tested in a few offices and tweaked to best fulfill forecasters needs.

Below is 40 minutes of 30-sec VIS/IR Sandwich RGB imagery over Hurricane Michael (Fig 1) on the 10th, along with corresponding VIS (Fig 2) and IR (Fig 3) imagery.

Zoomed in view on Hurricane Michael center of circulation just prior to landfall (Fig 4).

GOES-16 Derived Motion Winds (DMW’s) were available every 2.5 minutes within the 30-sec meso sector (Fig 5). As one would expect, most of the winds were in the upper levels (0-250 mb = pink). Low level winds (blue) were computed around the outside of the storm.

A daylong animation of the storm, including landfall, from GOES-16 5-min CONUS imagery (Fig 5). Note the eye holds together pretty well after landfall before filling in towards sundown.

Bill Line, NWS

A compact shortwave trough skirting across the norther-central US/Canada border sent a cold front racing south down the central US plains during the day/evening of October 3, 2018.

GOES-16 15-min full disk water vapor imagery depicted the progression of the shortwave east along the US/Canada border (Fig 1). Since NWS/AWIPS does not display GOES-R full disk imagery at full resolution, I prefer to do my long, large scale water vapor analysis time-matched to the full disk imagery with the full resolution CONUS imagery overlaid. The cold front can also be diagnosed in water vapor imagery surging south through the plains, is especially apparent over the high plains, and forcing the development of convection from Kansas to Michigan.

IR-Window imagery provides a highly detailed, both spatially and temporally, depiction of the cold air advancing through the plains (Fig 2).

The Land Surface Skin Temperature (Fig 3) and Total Precipitable Water (Fig 4) baseline derived products depict the cold and very dry airmass pushing south into the northern plains behind the front.

Bill Line, NWS