Feast Your Eyes on Brand New GOES-17 Imagery

Listen up, weather nerds! The amount of state-of-the-art satellite imagery available for consumption has DOUBLED! The era of GOES-17 is here. Yesterday, Kevin Micke, a web developer for the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA), tweeted that the first images of GOES-17 were up. Almost immediately, meteorologists and weather weenies alike were geeking out (me included): https://twitter.com/weatherdak/status/1034499746449084417 https://twitter.com/CIMSS_Satellite/status/1034605280003325952 https://twitter.com/GOESguy/status/1034500755347202049 While the new data is freaking amazing, GOES-17 has faced some set backs due to hardware malfunctions. Dan Lindsey, a research meteorologist at CIRA, brought us a few updates at the recent National Weather Association Annual Meeting. According to Lindsey, GOES-17's heat loop pipes, are not functioning properly which will require engineers to get a little creative to maximize GOES-17's data output. The satellite will rotate during each equinox to cut down on the solar load experienced on the satellite's Advanced Baseline Imager instrument. https://twitter.com/nwas/status/1034204291416944640 Without this rotation, the ABI instrument would be too warm for an extended period of time, causing increased outages in several data products. Longer wavelength products including infrared imagery is expected to be most affected. To compensate for potential data losses, the current GOES-West (GOES-15) will run in tandem with GOES-17. Don't worry too much, two more satellites (GOES-T and GOES-U) are planned for orbit that will provide identically beautiful and high resolution imagery. Naturally, scientists are learning from GOES-17's pitfall in hopes to avoid any further data losses on future satellites. For now, go get your fix of satellite imagery over on CIRA's Slider. Trust me, you won't regret it. (Note: GOES-17 data is preliminary, non-operational, and insanely beautiful) Written by: Dakota Smith.