The very cold and dry airmass over the eastern half of the United States during early January 2018 is mostly devoid of water vapor, a gas that, when present, absorbs certain wavelengths of radiation that is emitted from the surface (or low clouds). That absorbed energy is then re-emitted from... Read More

An AWIPS screen capture showing GOES-16 (GOES-East) Cloud Top Phase, Near-Infrared “Snow/ice” (1.61 µm), Cloud Phase brightness temperature difference (8.5 µm – 11.2 µm) and “Clean” Infrared Window (10.3 µm) images on 28 December 2017 (above) was provided by Dan Baumgardt and Dave Schmidt (NWS La Crosse) — they were inquiring as to the why the 1.61 µm... Read More

GOES-16, which has been sending data from the GOES-East position since 14 December, became the operational GOES-East satellite at 2100 UTC on 18 December, succeeding GOES-13 [which itself became GOES-East, succeeding GOES-12, in April 2010; (this post, from April 2003, is the first one with GOES-12 as the operational GOES-East, it took over for GOES-8... Read More

GOES-16 data posted on this page are preliminary, non-operational and are undergoing testingHurricane Gert, a Category-1 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, is over the open Atlantic Ocean east of Cape Hatteras. It is close enough to the USA, however, that it is within GOES-16’s CONUS domain where 5-minute sampling is... Read More