A line of dense convective clouds in the Pacific Ocean, south of Central America, produces lightning. The lightning is being picked up by the GOES Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). The storm system sits about 500 km north of the Galapagos Islands and extends eastward to the coast of Colombia.GLM, which... Read More

1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) Day Cloud Type RGB images (above) displayed narrow bands of mixed phase to glaciated (brighter shades of green to yellow) clouds that produced snow squalls as they moved eastward across western and central Pennsylvania in the wake of a cold frontal passage on 10 March 2024. Periodic lightning activity — denoted... Read More

Every Spring and Fall Equinox season, a brief period of solar Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) occurs whenever the Sun passes into the beam of a GOES ground station receiving antenna (2023 NOAA ESPC Notification). This RFI can cause a temporary degradation or even a complete loss of data reception. The exact time of... Read More

5-minute CONUS Sector GOES-16 (GOES-East) Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm), Near-Infrared “Snow/Ice” (1.61 µm), Fire Mask (a component of the GOES Fire Detection and Characterization Algorithm FDCA) and Near-Infrared “Cloud Particle Size” (2.24 µm) images (above) displayed the thermal signatures associated with a storage facility fire — which was responsible for 1 fatality and... Read More