Suomi NPP

With the advent of the GOES-R Series, forecasters now have an overwhelming amount of information to sift through. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument has 16 channels that image Earth’s weather, oceans and environment as often as every 30 seconds. How can meteorologists quickly discern the information they need to issue timely forecasts and warnings? Scientists are working on new ways to combine information from multiple ABI channels to enhance meteorological features of interest. The result is a variety of red-green-blue or “RGB” composite imagery. The stunning, colorful imagery you see from GOES-16 and GOES-17 isn’t just beautiful to look at, it also provides critical information to forecasters for situational awareness and nowcasting rapidly changing weather.

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” said the great detective Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story entitled “A Scandal in Bohemia.” We at NOAA couldn’t agree more and are highlighting the amazing things we can learn from data throughout the month of September during a celebration known as NOAA DataFest. After all, NOAA data are freely available to all who want to learn about the world and its many mysteries.    

On February 4, 1979, an iceberg slightly larger in area than the city of Indianapolis was first spotted in the Wilkesland Sea after breaking off (or “calving”) from Antarctica. Eleven years later, the giant chunk of ice known as C-02 had drifted farther north than any other in recorded history… until now.

In the late evening hours of August 17, 1969, a catastrophic storm named Hurricane Camille slammed into the Gulf Coast. A Category 5 hurricane, with sustained winds of 175 mph and a storm surge of more than 24 feet, Camille devastated much of coastal Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. More than 250 people lost their lives and damage was estimated at about $10 billion in 2019 dollars. 

Every evening from late spring to early fall, two planes lift off from airports in the western United States and fly through the sunset, each headed for an active wildfire, and then another, and another. From 10,000 feet above ground, the pilots can spot the glow of a fire, and occasionally the smoke enters the cabin, burning the eyes and throat.

When researchers from the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) trapped a young female Arctic fox near her den in Krossfjorden, Svalbard, on July 29, 2017, they were hoping she could offer a bit of insight into the spatial ecology of Arctic foxes. Researchers wanted to know how the animals use their environment in terms of hunting and protecting their territory during different seasons, so they outfitted the coastal or blue fox with a satellite collar and released her back into the wild. Little did the scientists know, less than a year later this fox would traverse barren polar environments, traveling more than 2,700 miles to a remote part of Canada.