The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R Series (GOES-R) is a four-satellite system that NOAA uses to monitor the United States, Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The satellites, operated in GOES East and GOES West positions, deliver a continuous stream of meteorological data that help support weather forecasting and severe storm tracking activities for the National Weather Service. Scientific researchers use GOES-R and its data to better understand the dynamics of Earth’s atmosphere, land, ocean and climate.

GOES-R’s Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) can be used to detect the presence of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key global climate indicator. The ABI instrument has a wide range of spectral bands to provide high-resolution imagery of the surface, which can be analyzed for observable evidence of carbon dioxide exchange. This data can then be linked to eddy covariance time series that are available to estimate terrestrial carbon dioxide flux.

ABI provides a number of unique features to characterize the intensity of convective storms, including total lightning flash rate and duration and cloud-to-ground lightning. Recent product demonstrations at NOAA’s Aviation Weather Center, Weather Prediction Center and Ocean Prediction Center suggest that the ABI-derived products offer the potential to improve weather forecasting accuracy and increase warning lead time.

The ABI instruments employ a servo-driven, two-axis gimballed mirror system with flexible scan control, allowing the instrument to provide spatial resolutions from a very small region to a full global scene (Earth’s full disk). This flexibility is critical for capturing convective events and their impacts across the full range of meteorological conditions and for providing real-time observations that can be rapidly analyzed by forecasters.

The GOES-R ABI instrument team is dedicated to improving the reliability of the system and increasing its capability to address critical operational needs. This work is accomplished through the efforts of many individuals in NOAA, NASA and industry. They include, but are not limited to: the GOES-R Program Office (ground, program systems engineering and flight); NOAA/NESDIS cooperative institutes, such as CIMSS and CIRA; GOES-R science teams, such as the aforementioned lightning working group; a number of GOES-R product development groups; and the GOES-R Imager and Sounder hardware vendors — Harris Corporation and Lockheed Martin. Fig. 11’s creator, Kaba Bah of CIMSS, is thanked for creating the animation. In addition, NOAA/NESDIS is grateful for the many contributions of the GOES-R ABI Imager and Sounder team members throughout the nation and internationally.