- Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance. Thanks, again, for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Tim Schmit. He's here on campus. He works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He's associated with the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies here in the tall building with all the wonderful dishes on it. My favorite joke is there's more dishes on that building than in most restaurants.   (laughter)   And it's also one of the highest flow-through places of meteorological data any place in the country, possibly in the world, and the reason for that is what you see up on what Tim has there. UW Madison is one of the birth places of satellite meteorology. So tonight's talk on the GOES-16 satellite is yet another milestone in that long and proud tradition here of innovation, meteorology, and meteorological satellites. Tim was born in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, went to high school in Hopkins, Minnesota, went for two years at St. Johns University in Minnesota, then came down here to UW Madison, finished up his bachelor's degree in meteorology, got his master's degree in meteorology, 30 years ago started working for SIMS, 20 years ago started working for NOAA. He makes and builds and helps launch and drive satellites that let us. They are our eyes in the skies. It's one of the great contributions of this university to the well being of humanity around the world. Please join me in welcoming Tim Schmit back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.   (applause)    - Thanks, Tom.   (applause)   So, thank you. Yes, we're going to talk about satellites, geostationary satellites. We'll explain what they are, basically past, present, and future. And, yes, that is me under the mask there. They don't actually let me build them, though. That's the subtle distinction there. So, of course, thanks to a lot of people. You know, I get to tell you about this wonderful new satellite that we just launched. It's in its current check-out phase right now. But it's literally a cast of, you know, ten thousands for everybody to have their piece in it from the hardware, software, building, transportation, check-out, etc. So, we're going to start at the end with some conclusions, a little bit of history about especially satellites meteorology. Then this new satellite, which is part of the GOES-R series. We give them letters when they're on the ground, and then when they get to geostationary, they earn their numbers. So, first of all, upper right there, you can see that's where my office is on the second floor there, or at least that's in 1967 when they were building. They didn't quite get up there. They were halfway done there. So, anyway, the bottom line is these satellites, geostationary weather satellites, critical continuity. You know, save lives and property for monitoring the environment. We call them weather satellites because that's originally what they were designed for, but they have a lot more applications than that. As you'll see, we've got instruments that look towards the sun, monitor the space environment, you know, aviation and environment, health, oceanography, etc. And, as was mentioned, geostationary imagery, it all started in Wisconsin with Professor Vern Suomi and continues on to this day. So, a little bit about history. So, first of all, myself. This is actually growing up. It's a picture of my dad. He worked to build these crystals. He worked for Honeywell and as a research scientist. And part of these crystals you could then measure the infrared or the heat of an object. So growing up I thought every kid's dad talked about detectors and phase growth and carrier concentration. I thought, I don't know, but maybe that's not the ca  So, for example, if you're looking at a full-disk image, this is actually from a recent satellite, full disk, you can see the western part is illuminated, the other is in night, but if you looked at it in the infrared. So, again, you know, data taken, calibrated, put on a computer screen so you can see, for example, the cloud patterns, etc, even though we don't have the visible light because we have the infrared. Another type of infrared is what's called a water vapor. And so this is, again, a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but this is where the frequency, the radiation, is absorbed by the water vapor molecules so you don't see this surface but then you can see jet streaks, still see clouds, low pressure systems, etc. So, again, those are a couple images from our current GOES. So, again, this spectral band doesn't see the surface because of the water vapor in the middle. So I mentioned 1975. So launched GOES-A, which became GOES-1. So one visible, one infrared. And then if you zoom in a little bit there on the hurricane off the eastern seaboard there. So, again, that was a great improvement in the deal about GOES. Again, it was operational. It wasn't experimental like the earlier ATS geostationary images. So our current GOES constellation. So we have a west satellite, so above the equator and 135 west, which gives that great view of the Pacific. And then another operational satellite on the east. Again, the equator and 75 west. So that gives you a view of South America, the Atlantic for hurricanes, and of course North America. We also have an on-orbit spare right now, GOES-14. And so that's for a backup in case something would happen to either the GOES east or GOES west or GOES-13 or GOES-15. So we had that satellite, GOES-14, up there, and we had this GOES-R, this new generation coming where we're going to get one-minute imagery. So somebody said, well, could we use that backup satellite to get ready and take some special one-minute scans? To my surprise, they said sure. I found out later the person who made the decision was retiring a month later. So I don't know if that had anything to do with it.   (laughter)   But the bottom line, this was 2012 that we first got these special one-minute scan. So, again, this was to give a glimpse into what this new generation was going to become. But we got data then in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, and were able to flow the data in an experimental way to the National Weather Service and other people so they could get used to how they're going to use this rapid scan. I like this loop because it shows convection in over just 30 minutes. So this might be the time between one image or between two images with a current generation. Obviously, a lot can happen. You've seen the convection, the overshooting tops or that bubbling. So, again, there's one example from GOES-14, and we looked at a lot of different phenomena. This happens to be Hurricane Sandy. We've gotten, actually, six days at it went up the coast. I was in the position that I got to tell the satellite operators where to look. So I was always very worried that we were going to mess up the coordinates and get like one-minute data of the southern ocean trade winds or something instead of Hurricane Sandy. But it all worked out. But anyway, you can see that, you know, center of the circulation there. So on the left is the ABI, or advanced baseline imager, what we have on the GOES-16 series. And that time cadence, or the one minute, versus the 15 or 30 minutes that we have on the current GOES on the right. So, again, this is just giving people a glimpse. So a little closer to home in Wisconsin. So, again, this is GOES-14 on the left. Visible imagery every one minute. So you see that bubbling, that convection, overshooting top and the updrafts, very strong. The feeder bands that go into this severe weather. I think it was some hail in these storms. So, again, we had a good run with this backup satellite getting ready for the future. When I started working on ABI it was 1999, and there were these eight spectr