Continuing in the tradition of a post looking back on some of the most interesting events of the year as seen by GOES, here is a summary of 2025 CIMSS Satellite Blog posts. A selection of several GOES ABI loops during 2022 and 2023 and 2024 showcased the diverse range of features observed, including, but not limited to, volcanic ash plumes, hurricanes, convection, fog, smoke, fires, dust and ice.

The goal here is to show a variety of phenomena and locations that NOAA‘s GOES ABI routinely monitors. Just one highlight per month (most months, sometimes it’s hard to choose just one) and we’re covering a lot of types of events, some of which were tragic, deadly, and/or costly. Most loops generated are from the University of Wisconsin-Madison CIMSS Satellite Blog, and the original blog posts are linked if you’re interested in reading more on any of these cases. Imagery from GOES-16, -18, and -19 are showcased, along with the ABI’s three different scan sectors: Full Disk (10-min intervals), Contiguous U.S. (5-min intervals) and Mesoscale sectors (typically 1-min intervals). The GOES-R Series has more than an Imager on it though and we’ll include some Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) data as well.

First we can celebrate 2025 with some full-disk animations from GOES-East using the CIMSS Natural Color RGB enhancement. We will start with the sunset view from GOES-East from Winter Solstice 2024 (Dec 21, 2024) to Winter Solstice 2025 (Dec 21, 2025). Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere is when the north pole reaches its maximum tilt away from the sun. Sunset for GOES-East (at the location on Earth directly below the satellite, roughly at the equator and 75W) is around 23 UTC. The exact time of sunset varies somewhat through the year, but we just chose the nominal 23:00 image for each day to make things simpler. And a handful of days are missing because of bad data.

Here is satellite noon in CIMSS Natural Color from GOES-East for all of 2025 (minus a handful of days with bad data). Noon for GOES-East is around 17:00 UTC.

January

The two highlighted events for January are the wildfires in/around Los Angeles and snow across the deep south. The LA wildfires caused damages estimated to be around $300 billion and at least 31 deaths attributed directly to fire. There were multiple CIMSS blog entries, not all GOES-centric, on this event: Palisades Fire (Jan 7), NGFS detections of multiple fires in/near Los Angeles County (Jan 8), Day Night Band imagery of fires over California (Jan 9), Landsat-9 images of the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire burn scars in Los Angeles County, California (Jan 14), and later in January the Hughes Fire near LA (Jan 22). Here is an animation of the first four days of the Los Angeles area wildfires using the ABI Fire Temperature RGB, January 7th-10th:

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This historic snowstorm across the Deep South left 8 (EIGHT!) inches of snow (official measurement at the airport) in New Orleans, Louisiana.

February

February saw South Dakota’s first February tornado on record on February 24. This animation features both GOES-16 ABI and the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM).

March

A strong solar flare captured by GOES-16 SUVI occurred on March 28th:

April

GOES-19 became operational as GOES-East on April 7:

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There were several blowing dust events in April, maybe the most impressive from GOES was the blowing dust behind a cold front moving across New Mexico, Texas and Mexico on April 19th:

May

Speaking of blowing dust, on May 16th, 2025 blowing dust prompts the issuance of the first Dust Storm Warning on record for the Chicago metro area:

June

In recent years we have seen more interest in the media as some part of the United States sees air quality impacts from wildfire smoke coming from Canada and 2025 was no exception. One example from June 11th was Canadian wildfire smoke over Alaska:

July

Unfortunately July 4th this year was marked with one of the deadliest flash-flooding events in US history and the deadliest of this century. Catastrophic flash flooding event in the Hill Country of Texas responsible for at least 130 fatalities:

August

On August 16, 2025 Hurricane Erin became the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic Ocean as it was north of the Leeward Islands:

September

There was a lunar eclipse on September 7th. Not for us on Earth, just for GOES, when the moon temporarily blocked the view of the sun from both GOES-East and -West. Effects of a lunar eclipse on GOES-18/GOES-19 SUVI imagery:

October

This year we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the launch of GOES-1 from October 16th, 1975 with this special look at a GOES animation from each of all 50 states: Fifty Loops for the 50th Anniversary of GOES

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On October 28, Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica as a devastating Category 5 hurricane.

November

In addition to being the 50th anniversary of the launch of GOES-1, 2025 was also the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This is one of the most well-remembered weather-disasters in US history and we take a fresh look at this storm from November 10th, 1975 with modern reanalysis data and modern tools. We don’t have any GOES imagery of this storm in our possession, but we have the next best thing: Synchronous Meteorological Satellite (SMS)-2. The SMS series was an experimental series of satellites that NASA launched and operated until SMS-C became GOES-1. SMS-1, -2 and GOES-1 through -4 are all the same design.

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With the two operational GOES, we can see over half the surface of the earth, from the west coast of the African continent to the east coast of Australia, and not quite to the north and south poles. American forecasters have responsibility across a large portion of that area and to highlight that, here is a case from November 20th of flash flooding in American Samoa, where they don’t have a radar and so satellite observations are critical.

December

For the last month of the year we will highlight two events. Both of these events have gone on longer than maybe one would want or expect. There has been a long-duration Tule fog event in the Central Valley of California that started on November 21st and continued for over a month. Meanwhile Mt Kilauea in Hawaii has been erupting since December 23 of last year!

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Thank You!

To close out 2025, we would like to say thank you to all of our readers! The author would like to say a special thank you to the authors of the blogs he borrowed from today: Scott Bachmeier, Scott Lindstrom, Tim Schmit, and Tim Wagner. Thanks to all who make the GOES imagery possible, the ingest and software to display the imagery (including, but not limited to McIDAS-X, Geo2Grid, GeoSphere, RealEarth and AWIPS). Special thanks to Dave Stettner of the UW/CIMSS AWG Imagery Team.

Special note: Scott Lindstrom has retired from UW-Madison and we will miss him, especially here on the Blog!

Looking for more satellite blogs? Check out the Satellite Liaison Blog.

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10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-18 (GOES-West) daytime True Color RGB and Nighttime Microphysics RGB images — created using Geo2Grid (above) — showed the offshore transport of glacial silt from the Copper River Delta in Southcentral Alaska from 11-23 December 2025. Even though cloud cover occasionally obscured the signature of this plume of airborne glacial silt, its southward transport over the northern Gulf of Alaska was occurring during the entire 13-day period.

Focusing on one particular day (18 December), a GOES-18 Near-Infrared image at 2100 UTC (below) included plots of Metop-C ASCAT surface scatterometer winds — which showed wind speeds of 35-37 kts immediately offshore of the Copper River Delta (which is located just east of Cordova, PACV). Farther inland and to the northwest, note the peak wind gust of 53 kts at Valdez (PAVW) as gap winds were being channeled down Valdez Glacier.

Metop-B Ultra High Resolution (UHR) ASCAT winds (below) displayed the narrow plume of higher wind speeds (shades of red) that arced southward then southeastward after emerging from the Copper River Delta.

RCM-2 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) winds at 1558 UTC (below) also highlighted the plume of stronger winds (shades of yellow to red) emerging from the Copper River Delta.

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Surface analyses during the 11-23 December period (above) depicted the strong coastal pressure gradient (closely-spaced isobars) between a cold inland area of high pressure and migratory areas of low pressure over the northern Gulf of Alaska. This strong pressure gradient forced gap winds to accelerate down the Copper River Valley (topography) and emerge from the coast.

The effect of the persistent inland area of high pressure was seen in a map of surface air temperature departure (below) — which ranged from -15 to -21ºF along the coast near the Copper River Delta (medium shade of blue) to -27ºF and colder (magenta) near the Alaska/Yukon border. On 22 December, minimum temperatures were quite cold across Alaska and Yukon (and included a low of -62ºF at Chicken).

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One of the most common sayings that a young meteorologist learns early in their education is that “air acts as a fluid.” Gap winds are an excellent illustration of that idea. As a fluid moves through a narrow passage, it has to speed up in order to ensure a constant mass flow rate, just like putting a finger on a garden hose to make a jet of water shoot faster. As air flows through gaps in mountain ranges, the ssame thing happens: the speed of the air increases so that the total mass of air keeps moving at the same rate as it was before it reached the gap.

Southeast Alaska is an ideal location for gap winds. The high, cold territory of British Columbia and the Yukon create large airmasses that flow downhill toward the Pacific Ocean. As these air masses reach southeast Alaska, they are filtered between the rugged islands of the Alexander Archipelago (the Pacific islands that comprise much of southeast Alaska’s territory). Thw air has to accelerate as it is being pushed from behind, and thus rapid winds form through and downstream of the gaps.

This can be seen in satellite products from 22 December 2025. Cross Sound is the body of water between mainland North America and Chichagof Island, the nation’s fifth largest island. The sound is at sea level, of course, but is flanked on either side by ridges that exceed 2000 feet (600 m) with only a 13 mile (20 km) gap between them. This creates a significant opportunity for gap winds. The following image shows the GOES-18 Channel 13 (infrared window) view overlaid with ASCAT winds.

Note that the winds downstream of the Cross Sound gap are 35-40 kts strong. With speeds that fast, these are officially gale force winds. Also note the cloud streets forming parallel to the winds. These are likely caused by the instability created when the cold continental air flows over the relatively warm sea. The “warm” maritime air rises to create convective clouds that are then organized by the winds into bands parallel with the flow.

As noted above, these gap winds form because the cold, dry, dense air masses of northern North America flow downhill to the sea. How cold is it? Let’s zoom out.

Here, we see the loop of GOES-18 Channel 13 imagery. The default color table in use here is designed for the continental United States. Those blues and greens represent temperatures around -40 F (-40 C) which are associated with moderately deep convection in the Lower 48. However, in the Yukon in December, those are surface temperatures. We can easily see that the Yukon is largely clear just by animating the satellite imagery. Those very cold structures are not moving, which means they’re part of the surface. Thus, we can tell that a very clear night produced bitterly cold air at the surface, a ripe setup for gap flow once that air flowed downhill to the Pacific. This animation also shows that the wind observations are only available for certain frames; this is because ASCAT is mounted aboard polar orbiting satellites and thus isn’t constantly available.

The ASCAT winds aren’t the only satellite-based wind instrument to measure the gap winds. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is another useful tool. These observations are available here and provide a nigher spatial resolution view of the surface winds over water at the expense of narrower swaths (and thus less frequent coverage). The finer spatial resolution enables us to see not only the gale force winds flowing out of the Cross Sound gap (at the top of the image) but highly localized regions of fast winds emanating from much smaller gaps as well.

A postscript: What does Chicaghof Island, Alaska, have in common with Chicago, Illinois, besides their very similar names? They’re both famous for bears! Chicaghof Island has the highest concentration of bears per unit area of any place on earth, while American football fans are quite familiar with Chicago’s Bears.

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A 29-day sequence of 10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-18 (GOES-West) daytime True Color RGB and Nighttime Microphysics RGB images — created using Geo2Grid (above) showed the evolution of a long-duration Tule fog event across the Central Valley of California, from 21 November to 19 December 2025.

The fog was more sparse in its areal coverage during the initial 3 days of the period — but became more persistent and widespread beginning on 24 November. The trend of increasing dense middle to upper-level cloud cover on 19 December (associated with the arrival of an atmospheric river) began to obscure the fog across the northern 2/3 of the Central Valley.

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