A strong surge of moist unstable air is being transported into the region ahead of an approaching cold front and upper-level shortwave. These features are expected to help trigger a round of potentially severe convection during the mid-afternoon to late evening hours. Outflow boundaries from nighttime and early morning thunderstorms are also likely to help focus some of the initial development of afternoon convection.
You are monitoring GOES imagery for towering cumulus and sounder derived products for trends in atmospheric stability. This can provide extra lead time before strong radar echoes show up. Current 15-minute and occasional 30-minute GOES imagery makes it difficult to capture individual cells that can form and intensify rapidly. Tracking the cells is also complicated by the imaging intervals. They're either too long or not concurrent with the 5-minute radar updates.
The GOES-R Advanced Baseline Imager (or ABI) will offer significant improvements to imaging resolution, refresh rates, and spectral coverage that will greatly facilitate the monitoring of the pre–convective and storm environments. Image products will capture storm evolution from the earliest stages of convective cloud formation to dissipation in detail that’s never been seen before. In addition, the ABI’s enhanced capabilities will allow imaging data and derived parameters to be combined with radar, lightning, and other data sets in new ways that leverage the strengths of each observing system and give forecasters the tools needed for improved analyses, nowcasts, and short-term forecasts.
This scenario highlights some of the improvements that the GOES-R ABI instrument will bring to weather forecasting. The rest of the module takes a closer look at the ABI’s capabilities and improvements. It shows how they will impact other forecast situations, numerical weather prediction (NWP), and climate and environmental monitoring.
The first GOES–R satellite is expected to launch in late 2015. It will begin nearly a decade of service to improve the quality and timeliness of weather and other environmental observations in the Western Hemisphere.
A cornerstone of the mission is the 16-channel ABI instrument.
The ABI will improve on the current GOES imager with:
Let’s review these one by one.
The ABI has an expanded suite of 16 spectral channels in the visible, near-infrared, and infrared regions. A new channel in the shorter wavelength portion of the visible spectrum (also known as the "blue region") will improve aerosol detection. In the near-infrared, four new channels will offer dramatic improvements for characterizing land and cloud properties and detecting aerosols over water. And in the middle and longwave portions of the infrared, six additional channels will improve depictions of tropospheric water vapor, dust, ash, sulfur dioxide, ozone, clouds, rainfall, and surface temperature.
Most ABI channels will have four times higher spatial resolution than the current GOES channels. This is due to two times better resolution in the north–south and west–east directions. Resolution for the current visible channel will improve from 1 to 0.5 km, and the resolution for the new shortwave visible channel (the so-called "blue" channel) will be 1 km.
Two of the new near-infrared channels will be sampled at 1 km, with resolution for the remaining near-infrared and infrared channels improving from 4 to 2 km.
ABI imagery and derived products will be produced for most of the Western Hemisphere every 15 minutes compared to the current three-hour interval. Over the contiguous United States, the viewing interval will shrink from the current 15 or 30 minutes to every 5 minutes. And a smaller scale movable area will provide imagery and a subset of products every 30 seconds, or two areas every minute, during severe weather and to monitor other environmental phenomena.
As this ABI simulation shows, all three coverage intervals will update and provide products concurrently and continually. The ABI’s new scanning technology will eliminate scheduling conflicts and tradeoffs necessary for the current GOES.
Landmarks and other features on the ground often move in animations of current GOES imagery. This is especially noticeable when viewing high-resolution visible imagery. Some of the shifting can be as much as 4 km during the daytime and 6 km at night.
With a more advanced spacecraft and onboard image navigation and pixel registration system, the GOES-R ABI will reduce the amount of image-to-image movement of surface features to 2 km during daytime and 3 km at night.
Pixel noise will also be reduced in the ABI imagery and products. With the current GOES, pixel noise becomes apparent when relatively little energy hits a detector. The effect is most common in the 3.9 micrometer channel, where relatively little energy is available at cold temperatures, and in the visible near sunrise and sunset. Noisy pixels are especially noticeable for very cold wintertime scenes during nighttime and for thick cirrus cloud cover such as the cold anvil cirrus cloud found atop thunderstorms.
ABI imagery will have less noise and pixel values will be better calibrated. This will improve the visual appearance of imagery and allow for more accurate derived products. These include cloud top particle size and liquid water content, vegetation health, fire properties, surface temperature, and aerosol properties related to pollution, dust, and smoke. Improved clear-sky brightness temperatures will provide better support for analysis and nowcasting, numerical weather prediction, and climate applications.
Collectively, these improvements will result in more accurate measurements for observing detailed structures and subtle features, especially on the regional and meso-scales.
Improved measurements will also make it easier to fuse ABI data with observations from other satellites and other observing platforms and systems.
Polar-orbiting environmental satellites, for example, are better equipped for vertical atmospheric profiling, monitoring atmospheric constituents, measuring precipitation, and observing Earth’s Polar Regions.
Missions that include Suomi NPP, Metop, DMSP, GCOM, and the future JPSS polar orbiters provide observations vital for the success of meteorology, numerical weather prediction, and climate monitoring.
By leveraging the capabilities of GOES and polar-orbiting satellites, tomorrow’s integrated satellite system will improve and expand observations to more effectively support weather analyses, forecasts, advisories and warnings, climate monitoring, and related activities for meteorological and other environmental services across much of the Western Hemisphere.
As a result of these improvements and an increased synergy between various observing systems, the ABI will produce 50 times more information than earlier GOES imagers.