‘It was a ‘wow’ ’
UW team key in developing weather satellite
The first images were stunning, like switching from black-and-white to a color high-definition television.
When a weather satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in November, scientists working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison anxiously watched the rocket blast into the sky, knowing decades of workwas heading skyward. On Monday, the first pictures from GOES-16, which stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, were released to a collective gasp from the meteorological community.
“It was a ‘wow,’ ” said Tim Schmit, a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration satellite research scientist who has worked on GOES-16 with researchers at UW’s Space Science and Engineering Center since 1999.
“For years we’ve been working and saying this is going to be great, we’ll have more spectral bands and more spatial resolution. But when I finally saw it, it was definitely a ‘wow’ factor for me,” Schmit said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon from the American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in Seattle.
The $1.2 billion NOAA satellite has been called a game changer in weather forecasting. The first of four satellites scheduled to be launched over the next few years, GOES-16 sports a camera aimed at the Earth that can scan half of the planet every 15 minutes, the continental United States every five minutes and targeted regional areas every 30 seconds in true color.
Located 22,300 miles above Earth, GOES-16 can home in on hurricanes, wildfires, erupting volcanoes and storms, giving forecasters lightning quick information. It also features a super cool lightning tracker that continuously monitors lightning strikes, and not just from clouds to the ground but higher in the atmosphere, to alert people at outdoor events of dangerous conditions much quicker and with more accuracy.
Pictures are much sharper than previous weather satellites and can better detect not just clouds but smoke, water vapor and volcanic ash in the air that could affect flights.
“The aviation community will be able to do better flight planning. Air quality alerts will be improved. We’ll have better information on forest fires and on heavy rainfall and flash flooding,” said Mike Pavolonis, a NOAA physical scientist who works at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at UW.
Scientists in Madison were involved in translating the weather service’s desires into the hardware of the satellite and developing computer simulations to show how the satellite could work. An integral part of the new satellite is translating all of the raw data flowing through GOES-16 into information that can be used by meteorologists trying to figure out if tomorrow will be sunny or rainy.
Hundreds of gigabytes of data are sent from GOES-16 every day through receivers on top of the Space Science and Engineering Center not far from Camp Randall Stadium. Once it goes completely operational later this year, the satellite’s signals will be translated into information forecasters can use to improve their predictions and monitor storms.
Experts at UW helped write scientific algorithms to “translate an incredible volume of data and distill it down to data weather forecasters can use to make an accurate forecast,” said Pavolonis.
Though it might seem odd that a city in the upper Midwest, far from hurricanes and tsunamis, is the center of weather satellite research, it’s mainly because of Verner Suomi, one of the first meteorology professors at UW. Suomi, who died in 1995, is known as the father of satellite meteorology. He founded the Space Science and Engineering Center, which developed the first weather satellite to provide images from geostationary orbit.
Now scientists at UW have been instrumental in the latest technology to improve weather forecasting.
“It will definitely save lives. There isn’t any question about that,” said Schmit. “Being able to increase the lead time for severe weather, better hurricane monitoring and watching for volcanic eruptions will save lives.”