The new location of GOES-16 at 75°W provides a new source of imagery for the western part of Africa, including including Portuguese and Spanish territories such as the Canary islands.
By HansPeter Roesli (Switzerland) and Jochen Kerkmann and Jose Prieto (EUMETSAT)
The imagery below (Figure 2) shows a comparison of Meteosat-10 and GOES views of the Canary islands on 19 December at 10:00 UTC, the local morning.
The horizontal resolution of GOES (nominally 0.5 km at the subsatellite point) at this obliquity is still better than that of the High Resolution Visible (HRV) channel in Meteosat (1 km at the subsatellite point).
This GOES animation, produced by CIRA, provides an example from the first date of GOES-16 operations over that location. On it, a change of land reflectivity can be observed in the course of the day, due to the reflection geometry on sandy soils as those in the islands west of the African continent.
That the amount of reflection at a given time is different between two reflection angles is clear in the comparison between GOES-16 and Meteosat-10 at 10UTC on 19th December (Figure 3), where GOES-16, from a low viewing angle west of the scene, shows much lower albedo values than Meteosat-10. This is a comparison of the VIS0.6 channels (SEVIRI VIS0.6 at 3 km resolution compared to AVI VIS0.6 at 0.5 km resolution) so both images are taken at the same wavelength (same band). This is not the case in Figure 2.
In the local morning GOES-16 provides land albedos lower than those on the ocean. At local midday (13:00 UTC) over the Canaries, on 15 December (Figure 4), we see a comparison of three channels on two satellites, HRV on Meteosat and 0.6µm on both satellites, leading to similar values within 10% accuracy around the local midday, when the two satellites show more similar viewing angles.
GOES-16 reinforces the observation capability of geostationary satellites for the eastern Atlantic in a substantial way.
Note: NOAA's GOES-16/E satellite has not been declared operational and its data are preliminary and undergoing testing.