An F5 tornado struck the village of Oakfield, Wisconsin late in the day on 18 July 1996 (NWS Milwaukee story). An animation of GOES-8 (GOES-East) Visible images (below) showed the development of supercell thunderstorms as they moved east-southeastward across the area. Oakfield is located just southwest of Fond du Lac (KFLD), and... Read More

Beginning on 06 February 2021, the GOES-15 satellite was brought out of storage for a 14-day period of imaging (as part of its annual checkout activities). On 10 February, a comparison of Water Vapor images from GOES-17 (6.9 µm) and GOES-15 (6.5 µm) showed mountain waves over southeastern Wyoming and... Read More

GOES-14 was brought out of storage on 31 July 2019, for its annual week of Image Navigation and Registration (INR) testing and a North/South station-keeping maneuver — the first few hours of Full Disk Visible (0.63 µm) images are shown above. The SSEC Satellite Data Services group was able to position a spare... Read More

An interesting linear feature appeared over the East Pacific Ocean on GOES-15 (GOES-West) Water Vapor (6.5 µm) images (above) on 23 May 2017, which at first glance immediately nominated it for the “What the heck is this?” blog category. A contrail was ruled out, since it was not oriented along... Read More