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ShareApr. 5, 2013 — NOAA's GOES-13 and GOES-15 weather satellites sit 60 degrees apart in a fixed orbit over the eastern and western U.S., respectively, providing forecasters with a look at the movement of weather systems in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The GOES Project at the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. announced the creation of satellite animations of both GOES-13 and GOES-15 to show continuous views of both oceans, with conjoined images reminiscent of binoculars.
NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites collect full disk images of the eastern and western sides of the Americas every 3 hours, providing 8 views per day of the clouds over the entire western hemisphere. Overlaid on color maps, the time-series of GOES cloud images provide a review of the large-scale weather.
Recently, Dennis Chesters of the NASA GOES Project created an algorithm that combined the full disk images from both GOES-13 and GOES-15 (or GOES-EAST and GOES-WEST) into a wide animation that shows two rounded images of Earth and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as if you were looking with wide-set eyes.
"I was inspired to create this 10-day long, up-to-date, animation of the western hemisphere by the long-range skill in this winter's severe weather forecasts," Chesters said. "Indeed, the forecasts are made possible by the geosynchronous satellites' ability to follow storms carried around the world by the westerlies." The imagery is amazing because it provides a wide view of systems moving around one half of the world in a single animation that can track a weather system moving through the Pacific across the Continental U.S and into the Atlantic, on its way to Europe.
To see the dual ocean GOES Satellite animations, visit the NASA GOES Project webpage at http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/, and click on " Two-disk movie." The movies are downloadable from the site and updated every hour.
NOAA manages the GOES program, establishes requirements, provides all funding and distributes environmental satellite data for the United States. NASA Goddard procures and manages the design, development and launch of the satellites for NOAA on a cost reimbursable basis.
To see the dual ocean GOES Satellite animations, visit: http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/
For more information about NOAA's GOES satellites, visit: http://www.goes.noaa.gov/
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