The GOES satellite system has served NOAA for 40 years and continues to help forecasters predict severe weather events, detect and track fires, as well as provide valuable scientific data on Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and climate. This data is vital to a wide range of operations and activities, including search and rescue efforts, radio wave communication and navigation systems, electric power grids, and even the missions of astronauts aboard the Space Station, high-altitude aviators and geophysical explorers on land.

NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service builds and launches the GOES series of satellites and operates them for the benefit of all Americans. GOES is one of NOAA’s most important programs for the public, providing information about weather and solar activity in real time.

A new version of the GOES Imager will be flying on GOES-18. This upgrade, known as GOES-18 Imager Block 1 (GBIB) upgrades the instrument’s spatial and temporal imaging capabilities by more than double, and improves its ability to capture meteorological phenomena like clouds and fog.

The upgraded GBIB will also be able to take pictures at a rate of 30 Mesoscale images and one Full Disk image every 15 minutes. This will allow the satellite to keep an eye on a large area of the country and can be used to identify changes in atmospheric conditions that affect people, animals and infrastructure.

GOES-18 also has a new tool for studying seasonal changes in the Amazon rainforest. While previous studies have used polar-orbiting satellites that fly over the region only once or twice per day, the GOES-18 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is in geostationary orbit and can observe the Amazon at regular intervals for entire days. This can help scientists develop a more nuanced view of the carbon cycle and better understand how climate change might impact the forest’s productivity.

In other news, GOES-R is making great progress as it prepares for launch. The GOES-R mission rehearsals are stepping up to simulate critical post-launch activities, like spacecraft separation from the rocket and instrument activations. All GOES-S instruments, including EXIS, SUVI and the ABI have been delivered for integration with the satellite, and a system module that is the brains of the spacecraft has been completed and flown in to Lockheed Martin’s Littleton facility for mating with the sun-pointing platform.

Also in preparation for GOES-R’s launch, the CCOR instrument is being finalized for integration with the spacecraft. CCOR is a follow-on to the Lasco Coronagraph for Space Weather (LASCO) instrument that currently flys on GOES-13. CCOR is designed to be a single instrument that can simultaneously provide CME (coronal mass ejection) imagery for both the Earth-sun line and the sun’s surface, providing continuity of crucial CME observations for NOAA.