Next-gen NOAA weather satellite giving meteorologists big forecasting edge
After launching in June 2024, a brand new weather satellite is finally up and running.
"I don't know what the right word is, but it sort of, it completes something I've been working on my entire career," said Dan Lindsey, the GOES-R program scientist at NOAA.
GOES-19 began its trip to space last summer and since then, scientists like Lindsey, who oversee the program, have been making sure it's ready to go.
"They have to make sure it's pointing in the right direction. It has to make sure that everything is lined up the way we want. And then all seven of those instruments have to be individually tested. They're turned on. Their sample data is collected," Lindsey said.
With those tests going smoothly, GOES-19 is officially watching over us as GOES-East.
Many of the instruments on board, like the advanced baseline imager and lightning mapper look down at storms on earth, creating various loops helping NEXT Weather meteorologists prepare your forecasts.
But this satellite has an extra tool: the compact coronagraph. That looks up at the sun to help track solar storms, which give us the beautiful northern lights, but can also cause radio blackouts and power outages.
"It sort of blocks out the sun itself and allows us to take pictures of that corona. And that allows us to detect these coronal mass ejections and predict when they're going to impact the Earth," Lindsey said.
He says all of last year's solar storms were perfect for testing. And even with all the buzz around this new gadget, there's already a lot of hype about what's next to improve weather forecasting.
"The future series is called GeoXO, or Geostationary Extended Observations, launching in 2032. We're going to go from two spacecraft to three, and add some new instrumentation and also make some improvements to our existing imager and lightning mapper capabilities," Lindsey said.
This new satellite will help meteorologists track hurricanes, thunderstorms and winter storms well into the 2030s until the next generation of satellites are ready to go.
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