GOES-16 Mesoscale Sector 1 imagery, in its default position over the metropolitan New York City aviation hub, also views western New York. It was therefore able to view the beginning of a large fire at a cardboard container recycling and manufacturing facility in Niagara Falls (Youtube link) on 20 November 2020. GOES-16 Band 7 shortwave infrared (3.9 µm) imagery, above, first detected the fire hot spot at about 1441 UTC, or 9:41 AM EST (It becomes visually apparent in the imagery at about 1447 UTC). GOES-16 continued to observe the fire until clouds moved into the area around 1600 UTC, or 11 AM EST, as shown in the Fire RGB animation, below, from 1430 – 1630 UTC, and in this visible imagery animation. (Click here to view the Band 7 (3.9 µm) animation from 1430 – 1630)

The warmest GOES-16 Band 7 (3.9 µm) pixel temperature occurred at 1512 UTC: 53.5ºC. Click here to see the image; (here’s the Fire RGB for that time).

Radar observed the fire’s plume (link from 1550 UTC, courtesy Michael Fries, NWS BUF). Thanks also to Michael for alerting us to this event.

A thin veil of clouds had overspread the area by 1737 UTC — but in a time-matched comparison of Shortwave Infrared images from #SuomiNPP and #GOES16, the superior 375-meter spatial resolution of VIIRS imagery still detected a thermal signature of 51.8ºC: https://t.co/CF999nV7HV pic.twitter.com/ndZrAHFID9

— Scott Bachmeier (@CIMSS_Satellite) November 21, 2020

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GOES-17 (GOES-West) True Color Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images created using Geo2Grid (above) showed the offshore transport of glacial silt across the Gulf of Alaska during the 17-18 November 2020 period. A strong pressure gradient between an inland dome of high pressure and a low pressure system off the coast of British Columbia (surface analyses) forced strong gap winds that accelerated down glacial valleys — lofting the glacial silt from the surface and carrying it off the coast. The most notable plume on both days was streaming out of the Copper River Valley.

Metop-A ASCAT surface scatterometer winds from this site (below) revealed wind speeds in the 30-40 knot range exiting the coast of the northern Alaska Panhandle at 0536 UTC on 18 November.

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EWS-G1 (Electro-optical Infrared Weather System Geostationary) is a U.S. Space Force mission. Images are now available on the UW/SSEC geo-browser. Full Disk images are obtained every 30 minutes. An EWS-G1 “quick-guide (pdf)”.

The above animation shows the 5 spectral bands on the EWS-G1 imager. There is one visible band and four infrared bands.

This multi-panel image shows all the 5 bands at one given time (and showing full disk images).

A loop of all five spectral bands.

The EWS-G1 was formerly NOAA’s GOES-13. Contact the UW/SSEC Satellite Data Services for information of data access / subscription, if more than the posted near realtime imagery are needed.

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Overlapping 1-minute Mesoscale Domain Sectors provided 30-second images from all 16 ABI spectral bands of GOES-16 (GOES-East) — which showed signatures of the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (carrying the Crew Dragon mission) shortly after sunset on 15 November 2020 (above). Moving rapidly northeastward was the thermal signature of air that was super-heated by the rocket exhaust, evident in all of the Near-Infrared bands (3-6) and Infrared bands (7-16) — in addition to a separate signature of the low-altitude booster rocket condensation cloud that was seen in all of the Infrared bands (drifting slowly eastward offshore, away from the launch site).

Even though a dim signature was not obvious in the Visible bands (1, 2), AWIPS cursor sampling of reflectance values from GOES-16 Bands 1, 2 and 3 at 0027 UTC (below) revealed small values (0.1%) for those two spectral bands at the location of the brightest Band 3 pixel (near the launch site).

In a zoomed-in comparison of GOES-16 Visible and Near-Infrared spectral bands (below), a special enhancement was used to enhance reflectance — obvious rocket booster signatures were apparent in the Near-Infrared bands (3-6), and a small bright pixel was even seen in the Band 2 Visible imagery during the ~1.5 minutes following the 0027 UTC launch.

A 16-panel display of all GOES-16 ABI spectral bands from 0026-0031 UTC is shown below.

A GOES-17 (GOES-West) Mesoscale Sector was also positioned over the launch area — in a comparison of 1-minute GOES-17 and 30-second GOES-16 Upper-level Water Vapor (6.2 µm) and Shortwave Infrared (3.9 µm) images (below), the rocket booster engine thermal signature was prominent during the first 2 minutes post-launch. The images are displayed in the native projection of each satellite.

Larger-scale views of Shortwave Infrared and Water Vapor images from GOES-16 and GOES-17 are shown below (credit: Tim Schmit, NOAA/NESDIS/CIMSS @GOESguy).

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