The first imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s newest space-based lightning tracking tool has been released, and it’s a doozy. The weather satellite GOES-19 began testing out its Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument just as two consecutive powerful hurricanes battered portions of the United States.
The latest addition to the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite family, GOES-19, is designed to, in part, monitor all forms of lightning. While you might be most familiar with cloud-to-ground lightning, other types of lightning are confined to the sky. As hurricanes Helene and Milton formed, NOAA and its partner agency, NASA, were able to watch it happen thanks to the GLM in unprecedented detail and precision. In a statement, NOAA said future data collected by GOES-19 could be vital in developing new models of storm analysis and prediction, and could also play a big role in helping chart safer paths for airplanes as future storms form, particularly over portions of the oceans that lack radar coverage.
Here’s Why Hurricane Milton Caused So Many Tornadoes
In contrast to the devastation on the ground, the imagery from space is jarringly beautiful. While footage of both hurricanes showed lightning sparking like fireflies across the storm clouds, it also shows how the storms formed in different ways. Images from September 24 show several thunderstorms converging into Hurricane Helene, which made landfall two days later, pummeling six states. In contrast, as Milton began forming, intense, continuous eyewall lightning can be seen in the storm’s core. The storm eventually became a Category 5 hurricane that did major damage across Florida.
In a statement, NOAA said the imagery and data collected so far is preliminary. The satellite, launched on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in June, is currently in post-launch testing—a phase where its instruments and systems are readied for full operation.
The fourth and final satellite in a series that began launching in 2016, it’s designed to monitor severe rain and snowstorms, wildfires, floods, lightning, dense fog, and other weather events. Once it’s fully operational, which NOAA said should happen in April 2025, it will replace its predecessor GOES-16 as GOES-East. The name is somewhat confusing, since the satellite is in orbit over the western hemisphere, but it’s all relative. GOES-East orbits over the 75th Meridian West, which is east of GOES-West’s orbit over the 132nd Meridian West. Smack dab between the two is the 100th Meridian, where the great plains begin. See? It all makes sense.
SpaceX Will Launch Major Next-Gen Weather Satellite With $153 Million From NASA
As gorgeous as the imagery from GOES-19 is, there’s more advanced weather imaging on the horizon. NASA and NOAA are teaming up one more to develop the next generation of monitoring satellites, which they’re calling the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) system. Those will be equipped with even more advanced instruments to watch and map lightning, as well as track air quality, extreme weather events, ocean algae blooms, water quality, oil spills, and a slew of other potentially hazardous phenomena. GeoXO is currently scheduled to begin operations sometime in the early 2030s.
Extreme weatherNASANOAASatellite ImagessatellitesWeather
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Source: Gizmodo