The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) is a geostationary weather satellite system operated by NOAA. It provides real-time atmospheric data to support weather forecasting, severe storm tracking, meteorology and climate research. The National Weather Service and the Meteorological Services of Canada use GOES and related NOAA satellite systems for their North American weather operations, and scientific researchers use it to help understand land, atmosphere, ocean, and climate dynamics. The GOES system and associated data, products, and imagery are provided free of charge.

GOES has two primary payload instruments, an Imager and a Sounder. The Imager detects radiated and reflected solar energy across the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, providing data to identify many types of weather phenomena such as clouds, fog, snow, ice and precipitation. The Sounder senses emitted and reflected thermal energy to determine vertical profiles of temperature and moisture. An additional sensor on GOES, the Space Environment Monitor (SEM), detects radiation from the Sun and the near-Earth solar-terrestrial electromagnetic environment.

An onboard data collection system relays environmental data transmissions from remotely located in-situ sites at or near the Earth’s surface, to properly equipped receiving stations that are in radio view of the GOES satellites. The DCS onboard GOES also retransmits narrow-band WEFAX (Weather Facsimile) data transmissions from other GOES satellites and from a few interrogated, or “called” GOES-DCPs.

Data transmitted to the GOES DCS is automatically triggered by the DCPs, and consists of message information (i.e., data) and an indicator of the DCP’s transmit time. The GOES DCS then automatically relays these messages to the NOAA ground system, which provides the RF front-end equipment that translates and processes the data, transferring it to small, regional data utilization centers for distribution to users.

The GOES-R series is the next generation of NOAA’s geostationary operational environmental satellite system. Launched in November 2016, the first of the GOES-R series is carrying a state-of-the-art, 16-band Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). ABI offers improved spectral, spatial, and temporal resolution; a better radiometric performance; and an image navigation and registration capability that improves image accuracy.

The GOES-R series is a NOAA/NASA program. NOAA manages the GOES-R series program and is responsible for funding, requirements and operations of the system in orbit; NASA, under contract to NOAA, procures the spacecraft and its instruments and conducts the development and launch activities. The GOES-R series is designed to have a lifespan of ten years in orbit. NOAA is the primary user of the GOES-R series satellites, including its data and products.