NASA's GOES satellite shows its power in Hurricane Florence

Remember those incredible satellite images that we followed as Hurricane Florence headed for the Carolinas coast? Thank NASA's GOES-East satellite and save an inch for NASA scientists in Alabama who help manage the real-time data being broadcast.

GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, and there is a new generation in space. GOES-East, the satellite that monitors the eastern half of the Western Hemisphere, was launched in 2016 and is fully operational. It is the satellite that has watched Florence closely. GOES-West became operational in March.

The key word is "geostationary". Orbiting in a fixed position 25,000 feet above the Earth, the GOES satellites are high enough to capture the entire continental United States and powerful enough to follow a single hurricane. Soon, scientists hope to superimpose lightning data on GOES images in real time for the best chance of predicting tornadoes before they fall to the ground.

"A unique generation change in satellite detection," Jack Kaye, of NASA's headquarters, told GOES on Friday. Kaye was one of the guests at the inauguration of a new high-performance GOES receiving station at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

"It has a resolution four times that of the previous generation of weather satellites," said Dr. Marshall Jedlovec, while standing near the two new satellite receiving antennas.

Jedlovec heads the Earth Sciences Office in Marshall. Nearly one hundred scientists and researchers from the University of Alabama at Huntsville process the GOES data and pass it on to researchers and forecasters in 30 local weather offices in East and West. southern United States.

Satellites can send a new image every 30 seconds. The data is useful for research and forecasting, and is also available to the public on NASA websites.

What kind of research? Climate variability is one area and the water cycle is another. The fixed position of the satellite makes it possible to see in the long term how these systems evolve over time. NASA provides the data and the scientists perform the analysis.

"It's a national asset," McConnaughey said of the new data center. He is Associate Director of Technical Programs at Marshall.

The new bays are also added to the NASA bus tour available daily from the US Space Center.