Seattle, Washington as viewed by 4 GOES
The GOES-13 satellite was brought out of storage for annual maintenance activities on 13 February 2019 — allowing for a unique view of the Seattle, Washington area from that satellite as well as GOES-15, GOES-16 (GOES-East) and GOES-17 (GOES-West). After receiving significant snowfall during the previous several days, snowcover was abundant across that region. The brighter-white snow-covered mountain peaks south and southeast of Seattle (especially that of Mount Rainier) were also apparent on visible imagery from all 4 satellites.Note that visible images from the older GOES-13/GOES-15 are not as bright as those from the newer GOES-16/GOES-17 — performance of visible detectors on the previous generation of satellites degraded over time, while the new GOES-R series benefits from on-orbit calibration of the visible detectors to mitigate this effect.
Using a spare rooftop antenna, staff at the SSEC Data Center were able to ingest and process this data from GOES-13 (in addition to the other 3 GOES satellites). GOES-13 will be placed back into storage on 25 February 2019.
SnOMG! Detailed list of snow reports: https://t.co/TLWHOeEyWr. Thanks to everyone who has submitted measurements! #wawx #wasnow pic.twitter.com/TXAkRUf2cu
— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) February 12, 2019
A toggle between larger-scale images using the 5 spectral bands of the GOES-13 Imager are shown below.