GOES-R Mission Overview

When severe weather strikes, our economy and our lives are at stake.

In the United States alone, over three trillion dollars of the economy are weather sensitive; and each year billions are lost due to damage to our crops, loss of time, and even worse, loss of life.

With improved environmental monitoring for better storm tracking systems, climate understanding, and ecosystem management, we can greatly reduce the effects of severe weather on our economy, our citizens, and our lives.

That's why NOAA's new GOES-R satellite is so important.

The next generation of Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites offers improved performance and new capabilities that will provide better predictions with improved lead times for earlier warning in preparation, better storm tracking capabilities, improved climate analysis, and much, much more.

Providing a system that performs to specifications, or better, is an important aspect of the mission; and our understanding extends beyond that to the needs of the end users that will ultimately acquire the information, products, and services produced by GOES-R.

The instruments that will fly in this mission provide incalculable value to our nation, and the sixty eight environmental products alone will forever change the way we view and respond to severe weather.

The Advanced Baseline Imager will provide over eighty percent of all the mission data, and it will offer high-resolution visible light and infrared cloud imagery to observe and monitor the development and track of tropical storms.

Area evacuations cost approximately one million dollars per postal mile, and the ABI capabilities will help to better predict the location of the eye of the storm, reducing the occurrence of unnecessary evacuations.

The Geostationary Lightning Mapper will provide unprecedented observations on thunderstorm evolution over most of the Americas and adjoining nations’ Oceans.

GLM will help provide early warning of tornatic activity, helping people to get out of harm's way, and track thunderstorms to improve airline safety saving fuel and reducing delays.

The Space Environment In Situ Suite would envelop and extend historically extensive energetic particle data in GEO, and measure the flux of protons, electrons, and alpha particles in the vicinity of the Earth.

The SEISS will give us insight into the effects of space weather on the Earth's environment and help track natural radiation in and around the Earth that causes disruption of radio communications, navigation systems, and is a hazard to humans at high altitudes and in space.

EXIS, the Extreme UltraViolet / X-ray Irradiance Sensor, detects both solar soft X-ray irradiance, XRS, and solar Extreme UltraViolet, spectral irradiance, EUVS.   XRS monitors solar flares and, thereby, helps predict proton events that can disrupt communications and degrade navigational accuracy.  EUVS monitors solar variations that directly affect satellite drag/tracking and ionospheric changes that impact communication and navigation operations.

The Solar UltraViolet Imager locates coronal holes, flares, and coronal mass ejection source regions.  SUVI data characterizes active region complexity, enabling improved forecasting of space weather and early warnings of possible impacts to the Earth environment. 

Studies show that the Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, and it may be slowly reversing polarity.  The Magnetometer will provide accurate and valuable measurements of the Earth's magnetic force field.

For these reasons, the GOES satellites are vitally important to our nation as weather and oceanographic sentinels, providing twenty-four-hours-a-day, three-hundred-sixty-five-days-a-year coverage of the Western Hemisphere.

All told, the GOES-R series will be much more than environmental and weather satellites.

They will enhance NOAA’s execution in all four of its strategic mission goals:  Ecosystem, Weather and Water, Climate, and Commerce and Transportation, as well as impact the nine GEOS Societal Benefits.

Together, our experience and dedication to mission continuity and mission success will help make GOES-R a reality and assure a coordinated, unified, and effective response to global needs.  

GOES-R.  The hemisphere needs it.  The industry partnership, with NOAA and NASA, can provide it.