“(GOES-R) ushered in a new and transformative era of advanced Earth monitoring technologies to ever orbit in space,” said Steve Volz, assistant administrator for NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service. “Our National Weather Service colleagues tell us that this technology has since changed the game for weather prediction.”

GOES-U, like the previous 18 GOES satellites, will change names once it reaches space and become GOES-19. It will then spend the next year getting into place in geostationary orbit so it can take over the role and inherit the title of the NOAA’s GOES-East satellite. GOES-R, that became GOES-16, currently is tasked with that role, looking at the Atlantic basin.

There’s also a GOES-West parked in space looking at the Pacific and a spare GOES satellite in case one of the two were to malfunction.

Floridians are used to seeing the end product of the GOES-East satellite as it’s the source for satellite images used for tracking tropical storms and hurricanes with its primary camera, the Advanced Baseline Imager built by Melbourne-based L3Harris Technologies. It also helps track thunderstorms, fires, floods and other severe weather across the U.S.

“It’ll be looking at the entire Western Hemisphere once every 10 minutes, the entire U.S. every five minutes,” Sullivan said. “It’s zooming in and doing what we call smaller mesoscale areas as frequently as every 30 seconds.”

A second instrument on board built by Lockheed Martin can take up to 500 shots per second “to track lightning to help identify severe storms likely to spawn tornadoes, hail and damaging winds,” she said.

A new instrument on board called the compact coronagraph will look away from Earth toward the sun to track coronal mass ejections that can threaten the planet’s electrical and communications grids.

National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan says live GOES satellite images blanket its headquarters.

“Oh, it’s constant. It’s always there,” he said. We have multiple computer monitors that always have satellite imagery on them. So we’re looking at just auto updates of every image — visible, infrared, water vapor. It’s constantly there.”

He said it’s the NHC’s first line of defense and invaluable for systems farther out before Hurricane Hunter aircraft can reach them, and the four satellites from the GOES-R series were a huge improvement over the previous series.

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