People should go easier on meteorologists when they get the weather forecast wrong. Those guys are doing their best, OK? Plus, they're dealing with some significant scientific handicaps. Even some of the most advanced like weather satellites in the world can't reliably tell the difference between clouds and ice.

But that won't be problem much longer. Last November, NASA launched GOES-16—NOAA's next generation weather satellite—into geostationary orbit about 22,000 miles from Earth. On January 15th, it started to send back pictures. The new satellite images aren't just pretty: Compared to the previous generation, GOES-16 has three times the spectral channels capturing images at four times the resolution, with five times the efficiency. Meaning scientists will have a whole lot more data to validate their weather and climate models, and a better chance to warn you when Mother Nature starts going rogue.

Being able to distinguish clouds, ice, fog, smoke, and ash seems pretty basic, but it isn't. With GOES-13's just five spectral channels, it all just looked, well, white. "When I saw those clouds, I just turned to someone and said, 'Holy cow.' It was jaw dropping for me," says Steve Goodman, senior scientist for the GOES-R program (GOES-16's name before the satellite reached orbit). "Now we'll be able to figure out these cloud evolution processes better, and validate whether we've got these weather and climate models exactly right—which I'm willing to bet we don't."

With GOES-16's 16 channels—two visible, four near-infrared, and 10 infrared, which you can see above—plus the heightened resolution, scientists can monitor everything from poisonous sulfur dioxide emissions from volcanic eruptions to melting snowpacks. "With this kind of resolution, if you were in New York City and you were taking a picture of Wrigley Field in Chicago, you’d be able to see home plate," says Eric Webster, vice president and general manager of environmental solutions and space and intelligence systems for Harris, which built the GOES-16 payload. In order to amp up the amount and fidelity of data this much, GOES-16 is much bigger than its predecessors, too: Harris had to develop a nano-carbon composite material—Webster calls it "carbon cardboard"—to save launch weight and keep thermal expansion from messing with the focus.

And because GOES-16 can scan the entire globe in 15 minutes, the US in five, and a major weather event (like a tornado or hurricane system) in 30 seconds, you'd better believe that weather prediction, turbulence forecasts, and storm warnings will improve too. "If you have five more minutes of warning, that's the difference between your kid playing down the street and being in your basement," Webster says. "In the end it's about saving lives and property."

Which, in the long run, means studying climate change too. The Trump administration isn't thrilled about spending federal money on climate research, but President Trump's Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross name-checked NOAA as a group whose science he respected—so they may even get to do it. "People will come up with hundreds of new things to do with this data," Goodman says. "We'll be able to watch ice melting and dust storms and vegetation changes throughout the day and over the years. It will certainly make a contribution." And when you consider that GOES-16's West-coast monitoring partner, GOES-S, will launch in 2018, and that many European and Asian countries have their own beefed-up weather satellite programsin the works, it seems like scientists will be in for a whole satellite constellations worth of science.