GOES-16 and GOES-13 Earth Photo Comparison from Jan 15, 2017

Jan 15, 2017

With five-times greater coverage, four-times the spatial resolution, and three-times the spectral channels than earlier generations of GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager can provide more detailed imagery and multi-task in ways that previous GOES imagers could not. For proof of that, consider the following image comparing full-disk images captured by two NOAA satellites -- GOES-16 and GOES-13 -- at the same time on the same day: 1:07 p.m. EST on January 15, 2017.

On the left is a color-composite full-disk image from NOAA's newest geostationary weather satellite GOES-16 (located at 89.5 degrees West longitude), which was created by combining data from the ABI's 16 spectral channels. By comparison, the imager aboard GOES-13 has just five spectral channels, and their data cannot be combined to produce color composites with this "true color" effect without the inclusion of additional data sets.

In addition to offering more channels, the ABI can provide a full disk image of the Earth every 15 minutes, one of the continental U.S. every five minutes, and has the ability to target regional areas where severe weather, hurricanes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions or other high-impact environmental phenomena are occurring as often as every 30 seconds.