Update on GOES-12 Cycle Slips
GOES-12 10.7 µm IR image using Side 1 electronics (left) and Side 2 electronics (right)
At 1645 UTC on 6 June, an Electronics Side Swap occurred for GOES-12 to mitigate the effects of Cycle Slips that were occurring around 0800-1300 UTC each day (See this link for an explanation). No Cycle Slips occurred in the GOES-12 imager data on 7 June; as a result, the images are much cleaner. The image above shows an enhanced 10.7 µm image from June 4 2012 using the Side 1 electronics, which side was plagued by cycle slips, and from June 7 2012 using the Side 2 electronics, which show no cycle slips.
GOES-12 Imager (all channels) for 0945 UTC on June 4th and on June 7th (click image to play animation)
The Cycle Slips affected all bands. Click the image above to see the improvement across all bands between 0945 UTC on 4 June and 0945 UTC on 7 June. Note that there will be slight differences for a given input radiance in the computed brightness temperature for each band for the Side 2 Planck conversion coefficients versus the Side 1 Planck conversion coefficients. Those differences are, for Band 2, 0.0001K for both detectors; for Band 3, -0.0001 K for detector ‘a’, 0.0631 K for detector ‘b’; for Band 4, -0.0001 K for both detectors and for Band 6, 0.0119 K. These differences are much smaller than the instrument noise.
Real-time imagery of GOES-South America imager and sounder data are available here.