GOES-11 vs GOES-13 water vapor channel images
GOES-11 and GOES-13 water vapor images
A comparison of GOES-11 6.7µm and GOES-13 6.5µm “water vapor channel” images from 23 September 2008 (above) highlights two important changes to the GOES-13 satellite:
- the spatial resolution of the GOES-13 water vapor channel imagery has been improved to 4km (compared to 8km on GOES-11), which allows for more accurate detection of mesoscale “mountain waves” (or “lee waves”) that had formed over Wyoming and adjacent portions of Colorado and Montana
- larger batteries on board GOES-13 allow the satellite to continue to operate through Spring and Fall season “eclipse periods”, when the satellite is in the Earth’s shadow (and the solar panels cannot generate the necessary power for the instruments). The blank GOES-11 images seen in the animation above indicate outages during the GOES-11 eclipse period