1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sector GOES-19 (GOES-East) Water Vapor and Visible images (above) included plots of Pilot Reports (PIREPs) of Moderate to occasionally Severe turbulence — several of which were in the vicinity of mountain waves over parts of eastern Colorado on 05 January 2026. It was notable that in the area where mountain waves were very apparent in Water Vapor images (immediately downwind of the high terrain of the Rocky Mountains), there were no clouds seen in the corresponding Visible images.

Cursor samples of 2 PIREPs of Moderate to Severe turbulence are shown below. In the immediate vicinity of the earlier 1939 UTC PIREP, the distinct signature of mountain waves — adjacent bands of warm/dry subsiding air (shades of yellow) and cool/moist rising air (shades of blue) — was evident in the Water Vapor image.

View only this post Read Less

A common sight on calm nights and early mornings is radiation fog: as the surface cools at night, the air above the ground cools as well. The absolute moisture content of the air remains the same, but since the temperature is dropping less water vapor can be contained in equilibrium and thus the relative humidity goes up. If the temperature cools enough, it will reach the dew point and fog will form.

But what happens when you throw a dense city into the mix? Cities are warmer than the surrounding land for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the building materials like concrete and asphalt that are prevalent in cities are better at absorbing the sun’s energy than vegetation is. The vertical dimension of cities also matters: the perpendicular surfaces of tall buildings strongly absorb the sun’s rays when the sun is low in the sky and the rest of the landscape is absorbing very little, and the infrared radiation that is emitted outward by one building is often absorbed by a different building right next door. Thus, cities retain their heat at night in a phenomenon known as the urban heat island, or UHI.

On the morning of 5 January 2026, widespread areas of radiation fog were visible over the southeastern continental United States, as large scale nocturnal cooling took place over the Carolinas and Georgia. This can be seen in the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB from the GOES-19 geostationary satellite as large regions of cyan clouds. Note how the clouds seem to follow terrain, which is expected for fogs. This particular loop spans the period from before to after sunrise, and (as one can guess from the name) the Day Cloud Phase Distinction product is a daytime only product, so it really only the end of the loop that can be interpreted in this way.

However, something interesting happens when you zoom in on Atlanta, Georgia. While the population of the city of Atlanta proper is relatively small (fewer than 500,000 people), it is the heart of the nation’s 8th largest metropolitan area, ranking it ahead of the Philadelphia, Phoenix, or Boston metros. With so much development, it has a well-pronounced UHI. Let’s look at the same product, zoomed into the Atlanta metro. This map shows the Interstate highways, and the center of the image where the highways all converge is the heart of Atlanta.

Note the gap in the fog right in the heart of the city. This is because the urban heat island kept the temperature of the central core of the city from cooling enough to allow fog to form. In the regions further out, however, the UHI was weaker. Out there, the air cooled more and condensation was able to take place. Sometimes, if you want to avoid the fog, all you have to do is head downtown.

View only this post Read Less

10-minute Full Disk scan GOES-19 (GOES-East) True Color RGB images along with the Aerosol Optical Depth derived product from the CSPP GeoSphere site (above) showed a pulse of blowing dust that was moving northward and westward across the northern Patagonia region of Argentina on 01 January 2026.

Surface analyses (below) depicted a cold front that was moving northward across that area during the day — a narrow cloud band denoted part of the leading edge of this cold front. The circulation around a compact area of high pressure that developed along the coast (south of the cold front, at 0000 UTC) acted to transport some of the blowing dust farther inland (westward).

View only this post Read Less

Continuing in the tradition of a blog post looking back on some of the most noteworthy events of the year as seen by GOES, here is a summary of 2025 CIMSS Satellite Blog posts. In previous years, a selection of several GOES ABI loops during 2022 and 2023 and 2024 showcased the diverse range of features observed, including, but not limited to, volcanic activity, tropical cyclones, severe convection, fog, smoke, fires, blowing dust, flooding and ice.

The goal here is to show a variety of phenomena and locations that NOAA‘s GOES ABI routinely monitors. Just one highlight per month (most months, sometimes it’s hard to choose just one) and we’re covering a lot of types of events, some of which were tragic, deadly, and/or costly. Most loops generated are from the University of Wisconsin-Madison CIMSS Satellite Blog, and the original blog posts are linked if you’re interested in reading more on any of these cases. Imagery from GOES-16, -18, and -19 are showcased, along with the ABI‘s three different scan sectors: Full Disk (10-min intervals), Contiguous U.S. (5-min intervals) and Mesoscale Sectors (typically 1-min intervals). The GOES-R Series has more than an Imager instrument on it though, and we’ll include some Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) data as well.

First we can celebrate 2025 with some Full Disk animations from GOES-East using the CIMSS Natural True Color RGB. We will start with the sunset view from GOES-East, from Winter Solstice 2024 (Dec 21, 2024) to Winter Solstice 2025 (Dec 21, 2025). Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere is when the north pole reaches its maximum tilt away from the sun. Sunset for GOES-East (at the location on Earth directly below the satellite, roughly at the equator and 75W) is around 23 UTC. The exact time of sunset varies somewhat through the year, but we just chose the nominal 2300 UTC image for each day to make things simpler. And a handful of days are missing, because of bad data.

Next is satellite noon in CIMSS Natural True Color RGB from GOES-East for all of 2025 (minus a handful of days with bad data). Noon for GOES-East is around 1700 UTC.

January

The two highlighted events for January are wildfires in/around Los Angeles and snow across the Deep South. The LA wildfires caused damages estimated to be around $300 billion, with at least 31 deaths attributed directly to fire. There were multiple CIMSS Satellite Blog entries, not all GOES-centric, discussing this event: Palisades Fire (Jan 7), NGFS detections of multiple fires in/near Los Angeles County (Jan 8), Day Night Band imagery of fires over California (Jan 9), Landsat-9 images of the Palisades Fire and Eaton Fire burn scars in Los Angeles County, California (Jan 14), and later in January the Hughes Fire near LA (Jan 22). Shown below is an animation of the first four days of the Los Angeles area wildfires using the ABI Fire Temperature RGB, from January 7th-10th:

---

This historic snowstorm across the Deep South left 8 (EIGHT!) inches of snow (official measurement at the airport) in New Orleans, Louisiana.

February

February saw South Dakota’s first February tornado on record on February 24. This animation features both GOES-16 ABI and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) data.

March

A strong solar flare captured by GOES-16 SUVI occurred on March 28th:

April

GOES-19 became operational as GOES-East on April 7:

---

There were several blowing dust events in April — perhaps the most impressive as seen from GOES was the blowing dust behind a cold front moving across New Mexico, Texas and Mexico on April 19th:

May

Speaking of blowing dust, on May 16th, 2025 blowing dust prompted the issuance of the first Dust Storm Warning on record for the Chicago metro area:

June

In recent years we have seen more interest in the media as some part of the United States sees air quality impacts from wildfire smoke coming from Canada, and 2025 was no exception. One example from June 11th was Canadian wildfire smoke over Alaska:

July

Unfortunately July 4th this year was marked with one of the deadliest flash-flooding events in US history, and the deadliest of this century. Catastrophic flash flooding event in the Hill Country of Texas responsible for at least 130 fatalities:

August

On August 16, 2025 Hurricane Erin became the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic Ocean as it was north of the Leeward Islands:

September

There was a lunar eclipse on September 7th. Not for us on Earth, just for GOES, when the moon temporarily blocked the view of the sun from both GOES-East and -West. Effects of a lunar eclipse on GOES-18/GOES-19 SUVI imagery:

October

This year we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the launch of GOES-1 on October 16th, 1975 with this special look at a GOES animation from each of all 50 states: Fifty Loops for the 50th Anniversary of GOES

---

On October 28, Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica as a devastating Category 5 hurricane.

November

In addition to being the 50th anniversary of the launch of GOES-1, 2025 was also the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. This is one of the most well-remembered weather-related disasters in US history, and we take a fresh look at this storm from November 10th, 1975 with modern reanalysis data and modern tools. We don’t have any GOES imagery of this storm in our possession, but we have the next best thing: Synchronous Meteorological Satellite (SMS)-2. The SMS series was an experimental series of satellites that NASA launched and operated until SMS-C became GOES-1. SMS-1, -2 and GOES-1 through -4 are all the same design.

---

With the two operational GOES, we can see over half the surface of the earth, from the west coast of the African continent to the east coast of Australia, and not quite to the north and south poles. American forecasters have responsibility across a large portion of that area, and to highlight that here is a case from November 20th of flash flooding in American Samoa — where they don’t have a radar, so satellite observations are critical. (Incidentally, there were a least 4 times in 2025 when a 1-minute Mesoscale Sector was positioned over American Samoa to monitor flash flooding.)

December

For the last month of the year we will highlight two events. Both of these events have gone on longer than maybe one would want or expect. There was been a long-duration Tule fog event in the Central Valley of California that started on November 21st and continued for over a month. Meanwhile Mt Kilauea in Hawaii has been erupting since December 23 of last year!

---

Thank You!

To close out 2025, we would like to say thank you to all of our readers! The author would like to say a special thank you to the authors of the blog posts that he borrowed imagery from today: Scott Bachmeier, Scott Lindstrom, Tim Schmit, and Tim Wagner. Thanks to all who make the GOES imagery possible, the ingest and software to display the imagery (including, but not limited to McIDAS-X, Geo2Grid, GeoSphere, RealEarth and AWIPS). Special thanks to Dave Stettner of the UW/CIMSS AWG Imagery Team.

Special note: Scott Lindstrom has retired from UW-Madison and we will miss him, especially here on the Blog!

Looking for more satellite blogs? Check out the Satellite Liaison Blog.

View only this post Read Less