GOES-R Series (GOES-16 / 18 / 19)

NOAA’s geostationary weather sentinels, built and launched by NASA. Parked 35,786 km above the equator, they hover over a fixed slice of the Earth and stare continuously — refreshing a full hemisphere every few minutes and a storm-scale box every 30–60 seconds. Not a NASA Earth-science DAAC mission, but the data are free on NOAA’s open archive, and the atlas uses them wherever a question needs real-time, high-cadence weather and hazard monitoring over the Americas.

What it sees

• ABI (Advanced Baseline Imager) — 16 spectral bands (visible, near-IR, infrared) at 0.5–2 km, the primary weather imager.
• GLM (Geostationary Lightning Mapper) — maps total lightning (in-cloud + cloud-to-ground) continuously, day and night.
• Scan modes: Full Disk (whole hemisphere, ~10 min), CONUS/PACUS (~5 min), and Mesoscale (a 1000×1000 km box every 30–60 s, aimed at active storms).

Why it matters

• Continuous, real-time coverage — unlike polar orbiters that pass twice a day, GOES never looks away, so you can watch a hurricane or thunderstorm evolve minute by minute.
• The mesoscale rapid-scan mode is unmatched for tracking severe convection, tornado-producing supercells, and explosive wildfire growth.
• GLM lightning data is a leading indicator of storm intensification.

Where to get the data

• NOAA Open Data on AWS: s3://noaa-goes16, s3://noaa-goes18, s3://noaa-goes19 — public, no egress fees, near-real-time.
• NOAA CLASS: class.noaa.gov — the official long-term NOAA archive.
• Google Cloud Public Datasets: mirrored GOES buckets for cloud workflows.

What it enables

• Hurricane and severe-storm nowcasting and tracking (weather, hazards)
• Wildfire detection and growth monitoring via the ABI Fire product (wildfire)
• Real-time convective-initiation and lightning monitoring (atmosphere)
• Fog, smoke, dust, and volcanic-ash tracking (hazards)
• Animated full-disk and mesoscale imagery for situational awareness

Gotchas

• Two operational satellites, different views. GOES-East (GOES-19) covers the Atlantic and Americas; GOES-West (GOES-18) covers the Pacific. Pick the right one for your longitude; GOES-16 is now in on-orbit storage/standby.
• Geostationary geometry distorts the edges. Pixels grow and parallax increases toward the limb and high latitudes — poor coverage above ~60° latitude.
• High data volume. Mesoscale and full-disk streams are enormous; subset by band, sector, and time before downloading.
• L1b vs L2. L1b is calibrated radiance; most users want L2 derived products (Cloud & Moisture Imagery, Fire, etc.).

Related missions

• GPM + IMERG (NASA+JAXA): merges geostationary IR (including GOES) with passive-microwave to produce global precipitation maps.
• VIIRS (NASA+NOAA): polar-orbiting high-resolution imagery and active-fire detection that complements GOES’s continuous-but-coarser view.
• AIRS (NASA): atmospheric temperature/humidity sounding for weather and climate.

Related datasets