The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) system provides a continuous stream of environmental data to the National Weather Service for weather forecasting and severe storm tracking, as well as meteorology research. The GOES spacecraft and ground systems work together to produce this data from the Earth’s atmosphere, land, and oceans.
The first GOES satellite launched in 1974, and its VISSR instrument provided day and night observations of surface temperatures, cloud heights, water vapor, and wind fields. The data that GOES 1 produced allowed weather forecasters to better understand the atmospheric conditions occurring over North America and helped improve severe storm prediction.
GOES satellites are positioned at geostationary orbit 22,236 miles above the equator, and they remain in their positions over specific geographic regions of the globe by rotating at the same rate as the Earth. The GOES East and GOES West satellites, in their respective positions over the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean basins, watch over more than half of the planet’s surface.
Each GOES satellite includes two primary payload instruments: the Imager and the Sounder. Both sensors use a servo-driven, two-axis gimbal mirror system to view the Earth in various wavelengths. The Imager instruments provide visible and infrared imagery of the Earth and its atmosphere; the Sounder provides multichannel soundings of the atmosphere, including vertical temperature and moisture profiles and ozone distribution.
In addition to the primary payloads, the GOES satellites carry an instrument called the Space Environment Monitoring (SEM) package. The SEM package, provided by NOAA’s Space Environment Services Center (SESC) in Boulder, CO, monitors the near-Earth solar-terrestrial electromagnetic environment, and provides real-time space weather data to SESC users.
During special events, such as severe weather or solar flares, the SEM instrument on each GOES satellite can transmit data to NOAA’s National Weather Service and other users on request. This data can be used to alert military and civilian radio wave and satellite communications and navigation systems, electric power networks, Space Station astronauts, high-altitude aviators, and scientific researchers to the presence of special solar-terrestrial phenomena.
A variety of GOES data is available for free via NOAA’s NESDIS website. A variety of different formats and resolutions are available for viewing images and soundings, and a number of software packages are offered to process these data into usable products.
The GOES-R Series of geostationary weather satellites launched as part of the GOES program are more powerful than their predecessors. The GOES-R Series imager scans the Earth five times faster and with four times the resolution of previous GOES satellites, and can detect clouds, lightning, and other hazards in 30 seconds or less. The GOES-R Series also has a new sounder that provides a variety of information, such as surface and cloud top temperatures, water vapor, wind speed and direction, sea ice concentration, and volcanic ash.
The GOES-R Series satellites are a joint partnership between NOAA and NASA. NASA builds and launches the satellites, while NOAA operates them and distributes their data to users worldwide.