GOES-15 Becomes Operational
At 15:45 UTC on 06 December 2011, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-15 replaced GOES-11 as the operational GOES-West satellite. GOES-11 (launched in 2000, and operational since 2006) was one of the older GOES-I/M series of satellites.
Compared to GOES-11, GOES-15 has:
- improved water vapor channel (Imager channel 3);
- slightly different visible channel (Imager channel 1);
- 13.3 µm IR (Imager channel 6) replaces the 12.0 µm IR (Imager channel 5) and
- improved Image Navigation and Registration (INR).
Examples of some of these GOES-11 vs GOES-15 changes before and after the switch-over can be found at the GOES blog archives.
With the operational insertion of GOES-15 (and the inclusion of the 13.3 um micron band) as the western geostationary satellite, both GOES-East and GOES-West Imagers are capable of generating cloud top pressures for both opaque and semi-transparent clouds using the same algorithm.
Material was also supplied for a "GOES-15 Becomes GOES-West" training session for National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices. Tim Schmit and Scott Bachmeier participated in the first training lessons that were offered during the week of the satellite transition.
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