Middle, High School, and first- or second-year college students nationwide can submit individual projects or in small teams with classmates. The main requirement is using satellite imagery and data from GOES-East or GOES-West to investigate weather and natural hazards. Students from the winning teams will receive $25 gift cards, plus valuable research experience for college or future careers.

Please note: The GOES Virtual Science Fair (VSF) is not being offered for the 2025-2026 school year. Please consider participating in the JPSS Virtual Science Fair!

How to Enter the Virtual Science Fair

1. Watch the Weather Satellites video on YouTube (7 minutes).
2. Complete the GOES-R Series Satellites Learning Module (about 1 hour).
3. Choose a research topic.
   • You are free to come up with your own idea, but some options include:
     • Forecast/hypothesize the near-term weather (start by checking the National Weather Service forecast) then analyze what evolves in real-time using multiple ABI bands (two or more).
     • Pick a case from the CIMSS Satellite Blog that includes multiple ABI bands (2 or more), then describe the case in your own words using the images in the blog.
     • Make a hypothesis about a natural hazard then analyze it with multiple ABI bands (two or more).
4. Create a poster.
   • You may use our poster template or create your own.
   • Examples can be found in the past projects accessible from the right sidebar.
   • Every poster must include at least two examples of GOES imagery used in your project.
   • Posters must be uploaded as either PowerPoint (.ppt/.pptx) or PDF files.
5. Check your work using the scoring rubric.
6. Submit your project.
   • Although optional, we appreciate having a high-resolution image of the student(s) included.
   • For high schoolers and college students only, please also provide a link to an uploaded video (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) or share a narrated PowerPoint in a Google folder. In the video, students should describe the poster in about 3-5 minutes.
   • Submit your high school or college project.
   • Submit your middle school project.

Frequently Asked Questions

I am a teacher. Can I assign this project to my class?

While we encourage teachers to assign this activity to their entire classroom, please conduct an in-house review and only submit the top three projects to the science fair. This keeps our number of submissions manageable.

I am a student. Do I need to have this assigned to me in class to submit a project?

No, feel free to enter whether this is an assignment or not! Any adult can serve as a coach – if you know a meteorologist, consider asking them to help with your project.

Do I need to submit a team project, or can I work on my own?

You may work alone or in a group!

What areas can we investigate?

Any area that GOES-16 (or -17) can observe, which covers North and South America and the surrounding oceans.

What files should we access for ABI data?

While the “radiance” files could be used, the most useful might be the Cloud and Moisture imagery (CMI) file that contain reflectance factor values for the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) bands 1-6 and brightness temperature for ABI bands 7-16.

How does one decode a ABI CMI file name?

Example file name: OR_ABI-L2-CMIPC-M3C02_G16_s20182831802203_e20182831804576_c20182831805093.nc.

“OR” means the data was produced operationally. “ABI-L2” means the data was made using ABI sensor on Level 2 (derived product). “CMIP” stands for “cloud and moisture imagery product”, and the “C” stands for “CONUS (Contiguous United States) sector”. “M3” is for Scan Mode 3, and “C02” is for Channel 2. “G16” means GOES-16 (the satellite name). The “s” is for the image start date, and the numbers following are the four-digit year (2018), the three-digit ordinal date of the year (283), and the time (hours, minutes, and seconds) in Universal Time (18:02.203). The “e” is for the scan end time, followed by the same time and date metadata, and the “c” is for central time. “.nc” marks the file as a netCDF.

What’s an ordinal date?

The sequential day of the year, for example, Oct 12, 2018 is 285.

Where can I find out more about the ABI and its band uses? What’s each ABI scan mode?

Information about this can be found on the CIMSS data master list, as well as in this journal article, “Applications of the 16 Spectral Bands on the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI)“.

What spectral bands are on the ABI?

The ABI band table shows each of the bands!

What are the 3 domains scanned by the ABI?

Full disk, Contiguous US (CONUS) and smaller meso-scale sectors. See examples in this ABI scanning animation.