Changes to the routine GOES-13 Scanning Schedule
GOES-13 10.7 µm images (click to play animation)
Tests are underway this week to determine the impact of augmented GOES-13 (GOES-East) imager coverage. The animation above shows the coverage for routine scanning on 3 March 2014 between 1645 UTC and 1945 UTC. CONUS, Extended Northern Hemisphere and Full Disk images are included. The Optimized GOES-East schedule is available at this link. Note the presence of local solar RFI (radio frequency interference) in the 1645 UTC image; solar contamination resulted in no 1702 UTC image at all, as expected (link). Data at SSEC that are contaminated by solar RFI are typically replaced by data from CLASS, as times of local solar RFI in Madison, WI typically do not overlap with times of local solar RFI at Wallops Island, VA.
The difference in CONUS coverage is shown below in the toggle of the 1732 UTC image from 3 March and the 1730 UTC image from 4 March. The Optimized Image scan allows for more routine scanning of the Caribbean Sea, for example.
GOES-13 10.7 µm images at ~1730 UTC on 3 and 4 March (click to enlarge)
Side-by-side views of GOES-13 10.7 µm images. CONUS from 3 March, 1732 UTC (left) and Optimized CONUS from 4 March, 1730 UTC (right) (click to enlarge)
A side-by-side image of the regular and optimized CONUS scans is shown above. Note that the optimized scan has a slightly different time (Nominal times for each image are in the panel labels). Thus, batch jobs that access imagery by time must be altered. Side-by-side imagery for the entire test period is below. The 1645 UTC imagery should cover the same domain, but RFI interference is different on the two days. The test period ends before the 1902 UTC image. In the animation below, the CONUS images at half-past the hour show the increase in domain size.
Side-by-side views of GOES-13 10.7 µm images, 1645 UTC through 1902 UTC on March 3 2014 (Left, default schedule) and March 4, 2014 (right, optimized schedule). (click to animate)
Four-hour animation of Puerto Rico Regional Sector, 17-20 UTC on 4 March 2014 (click to enlarge)
As noted above, the optimized scan strategy significantly improves coverage in the Caribbean. In fact, the Puerto Rico Regional Sector is now almost completely covered. The animation above shows that sector for 2 hours with the expanded coverage during the test, and the subsequent two hours. Compare, for example, the 1830 UTC image, during the test, to the 1931 UTC image after the test (image toggle comparison).
