Q: Can geostationary imagers see the very thin, very high Noctilucent Clouds? A: Yes and no, depending on the satellite, how data are processed, time of the year, time of the day and spectral band. Thanks to Simon Proud for this tweet using JMA‘s Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI):

Whoa, awesome view of #Noctilucent clouds over the North pole, seen by Japan's #Himawari satellite on the afternoon of 20th June.

This is one of the clearest views of noctilucent clouds I've ever seen, wonderful! pic.twitter.com/PZ8jAgOpW8

— Simon Proud (@simon_sat) June 21, 2022

Since NOAA’s ABI is a similar instrument to AHI it seems likely that ABI can also observe noctilucent clouds at times. Noctilucent clouds are possibly only observable in visible bands when they are off the earth’s edge, with space as a background, and when illuminated from certain angles. However, due to ground system processing in the generation of the ABI radiance files, most users cannot see data that the ABI scans off the Earth’s edge in space. Special processing of ABI data does allow to show off Earth pixels, such as in these examples with the moon and the Webb Space Telescope plume in space. Recall that the AHI Full Disk is made up of 23 swaths (as opposed to 22 for the ABI), so it scans a bit more space both north and south of the Earth.

An animation including the AHI 3.9 micrometer band shows the relationship between the Earth’s edge and the apparent cloud location. (A animated gif version.) Consider also the large apparent displacement of these high altitude (“shining at night”) clouds due to parallax.

Also see this image:

A fine display of #NoctilucentClouds just before midnight on June 20, across the northern sky. This was from latitude 51° N in southern Alberta, Canada. @NLCalerts pic.twitter.com/Miq2ckV2ni

— Alan Dyer (@amazingskyguy) June 21, 2022

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GOES-16 (GOES-East) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Day Land Cloud Fire RGB images (above) revealed several hail damage swaths — which appeared as brighter shades of yellow in the NDVI images, and shades of brown in the RGB images — across parts of Nebraska and Iowa on 20 June 2022. The swaths of cropland damage were the result of wind-driven hail events that occurred on 06 June, 07 June and 14 June. One of the swaths was nearly 90 miles long (due to a series of training thunderstorms), with some swaths as wide as 10 miles in places.

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GOES-18 images in this blog post are preliminary and non-operational

Overlapping 1-minute Mesoscale Sectors provided 30-second GOES-18 Water Vapor, Near-Infrared and Shortwave Infrared images (above) that revealed thermal signatures of the SpaceX launch of the SARah-1 Mission from Vandenberg Space Force Station in California at 14:19:00 UTC on 18 June 2022.

Signatures of Falcon 9’s Stage 1 booster were seen immediately post-launch (for example, at 14:21:55 UTC, above), as well during its “entry burn” to initiate a launch site landing (at 14:26:25 UTC, below).

Of particular interest was the brief expansion of hot water vapor and CO2 produced by initiation of the Stage 1 “boostback burn” (as seen in Water Vapor and Shortwave Infrared images at 14:22:55 UTC, below).

Plume RGB images (below) provided an integrated view of the rocket booster’s hot/bright thermal signature as well as the expanding cloud of water vapor / CO2.

A schematic of the Stage 1 trajectory is shown below.

Kudos to Todd Beltracci, The Aerospace Corporation, for providing a heads-up on this rocket launch.

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With the help of NASA, private industry and others, NOAA’s GOES-2 (as GOES-B) was launched on June 16, 1977. Similar to SMS-1/2 and GOES-1/3, there were 2 spectral bands: one visible and one longwave infrared.

A still image with a map overlay is also available to provide geo-referencing for the images in the above animation. Or a similar loop is also available with the map overlay The images in the loop (mp4 | animated gif) were taken just one year after GOES-B was launched. https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/images/2023/12/Geostationary_MetSat_History_2023update.jpg

The timelines show the periods when the satellites were operational. Yet, there were other times when they might have been operating. For example, when an on-orbit spacecraft comes out of storage once a year, often in August, for a routine check-out of several weeks. Another example was GOES-14, as it provided over 5 months of 1 min data (SRSOR) data to better prepare for the meso-scale sectors on the ABI. These campaigns were in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. Some of these times were:

In addition, GOES-15 was operated several times to supplement GOES-17 operations:

Start Date	End Date
20-May-2018	09-March-2020
04-Aug-2020	04-Sep-2020
04-Feb-2021	19-Feb-2021
02-Aug-2021	05-Nov-2021
17-Feb-2022	18-April-2022

The second timeline above includes not only the U.S. GOES imagers, but also their precursors: ATS-1, 3 (including the Spin Scan Cloud Cameras) and 6 (with the 2-channel GVHRR; including an infrared band) and SMS-1/2. The GOES-R Program Office also has a more simple GOES timeline.

UW/SSEC has an interactive timeline (opens in new tab) that covers more satellites. The SSEC library (Schwerdtfeger) also has more information on the Spin-Scan Cloud Cameras on ATS-1/3.

The above image shows a color-coded transparency for cold clouds over the gray-scale visible image.

After GOES-U, NOAA is planning on the next generation U.S. geostationary imager as part of the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) program.

H/T

Thanks to the many who made the GOES (and the precursors) possible. McIDAS-X software was used in generating these satellite images. The data (and many dates) was accessed by the UW/SSEC Data Services. More about GOES-16 and GOES-17 and GOES-18 (preliminary, non-operational).

Below are older versions of the timelines.

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