GOES-13 Sounder Anomalies
GOES Sounder DPI Lifted Index from 1300 UTC 15 September
The GOES-13 Sounder has been experiencing an increased number of unexpected scan line lengths. This was originally detected on 1 July 2013 and it has become more common since 12 September 2013. The anomaly is manifest in the data by occasional pixel gaps in all channels of the Sounder images. Some images show only a single gap (and therefore just one missing pixel); other images have several gaps. In the image above, the missing values are the black pixels just off the North Carolina coast (for example), or near the Mississippi River in southwestern Mississippi. Note that missing data only is present in the GOES-13 part of the domain. The GOES-15 signal is clean. The root cause of this error is under investigation. From NESDIS: “No telemetry violations have occurred, and all Sounder filter wheel telemetry data, including Filter wheel currents and period monitors, are within expected values.”
The missing pixels are also present in the real-time Sounder data available at CIMSS at this link. An example from September 15th is shown below. Or, click here for a composite (GOES-13/GOES-15) single-band image.
GOES Sounder DPI Lifted Index from 1300 UTC 15 September
A quick analysis at two times (0246 and 1446 UTC) suggests that prior to 28 August, errors per image were limited to 20 or so pixels. Between 28 August and 9 September, fewer than 100 pixels were affected each hour. Since 10 September, the number of pixels affected in each image has increased one some days to more than 200. There are nearly 64000 pixels in each sounder image, so the number of bad points remains a small percentage of the total.