GOES Celebration play list

74-73 Dreams long/short

GOES-12 is a backup satellite,
-- pre-planned self-insurance.
GOES-M was labeled "launch failure" in the schedule.
Launch control was asked not to take that literally.

GOES watches active volcanoes,
GOES monitors fragile cloud cover,
GOES was used in forecasts at the winter olympics,
GOES watches the stormy Great Lakes,
GOES monitors Cape Canaveral during Shuttle launches,
GOES is vital to tropical storm forecasting.

All in a day's work.

2 Peaceful long

GOES is better than weather radar
at seeing lake-effect snow
due to arctic air blowing across the Great Lakes.

GOES is the only way to monitor the hurricanes
that dither unpredictably off-shore,
such as in this colorized composite
of infrared clouds 24 hours per day,
enhanced with visible detail during the day.

GOES has a water vapor channel
that depicts the flow half-way up
in the atmosphere, where the jet streams dominate.

The jets streams carry global-scale storms
from east-to-west near the equator,
from west-to-east nearer the poles,
with turbulent mixing in between (where we live).

On top of that, there is a daily outburst of thunderstorms
every afternoon over the warm land masses.

This GOES channel shows the large-scale flow and chaos
during the busy hurricane season of 1995.

This animation shows the mid-atmospheric flow
seen at 3 hour intervals in the GOES water vapor channel
during the busy hrricane season of 1995.

Each named storm is labeled and highlighted.

Most storms form in "hurricane alley",
a series of storms spawned off Africa
and blown to the west by the trade winds.

If they survive passege across mid-Atlantic,
they can draw energy from the warm waters
of the Caribbean Sea and/or Gulf Stream
along the south-east coast of the USA.

In 1995, there were many large hurricanes,
with episodes with several raging simultaneously.

Most of the time, hurricanes are blown out to mid-Atlantic
by the prevailing westerlies from North America.
Otherwise, the insurance companies would go broke!

When a hurricane forms in the Gulf of Mexico,
it MUST cross over land on its way out.

GOES most unique job is monitoring hurricanes.

An unstable front across Texas suddenly "unziped" its energy,
spawning violent torandos,
including one that wiped out the town of Jarrell.

This post-launch experiment
shows what minute-by-minute GOES imagery
can reveal about hurricane development.

This GOES clip was shown on national TV on the day it way taken!

With minute-by-minute observations from GOES,
computers can track every cloudtop in a hurricane,
providing winds with heights estimated
from the corresponding GOES infrared data.

Tracking every GOES pixel gives a million winds per minute!

GOES has a pair of infrared channels
that show an unusual difference in temperature
from volanic ash.

This GOES animation colorizes the ash
from persistent volcanic eruptions
on the Caribbean island of Montserat,
with warmer colors for lower-level ash clouds.

These ash clouds can stop jet engines from working!

Some young ice-topped clouds get colorized too.

GOES images are widely used by the press.

One of the most popular GOES enhanced images
is hurricane Floyd.
It almost made the cover ot TIME, but was bumped by Gates.
It almost made the cover of LIFE, but was bumped by the Kennedys.

Eventually, it made a cover story, and it was
followed by many more such GOES "cover girls"
on popular science magazines and educational publications,
not to mention comics and checkout stands.

GOES images of hurricanes are emblematic
of the hazards of El Niño.

Colorized GOES images are commonly used
to symbolize global acceptance.

GOES reveals atmospheric transport,
such as the smoke from fires in northern Ontario
wafted across the entire northeast USA.

Remote fires, flaring up every afternoon,
are detected by the GOES shortwave infrared channel.

In the nighttime view, the low-light channel
from the DMSP satellite is inserted
to demonstrate what could be done by GOES-NEXT.

To demonstrate what could be done with GOES-NEXT,
experimental rapid-scan data from GOES
is given a 3-D look based on infrared cloudtop temperature,
and overlaid on a real-color image of Colorado.