NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite, formerly known as GOES-R, has sent its first, high resolution images, and now people around the world can see what this revolutionary satellite sees. These images from GOES-16’s new Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) instrument show the complete full disk of the Western Hemisphere and the continental United States in all 16 channels of the ABI instrument. GOES-16 was launched on Nov. 19, 2016 at 6:42pm EST from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first images usher in a new era of Earth and space weather observation for the USA. GOES-16 is the first spacecraft in the GOES-R series of four new NOAA geostationary satellites, capturing higher resolution images of weather patterns and atmospheric phenomena than any of NOAA’s GOES satellites to-date. The higher resolution will allow forecasters to pinpoint the location of severe weather with greater accuracy, ultimately saving lives. GOES-16’s ABI instrument, built by Harris Corporation, can multi-task in a way that older satellites cannot. It can provide a full disk image of the Earth every 15 minutes, one of the continental U.S. every five minutes, and has the ability to target regional areas where severe weather, hurricanes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions or other high-impact environmental phenomena are occurring as often as every 30 seconds. ABI covers the Earth five-times faster than the current generation GOES imagers, and has four-times greater spatial resolution, allowing meteorologists to see smaller features. (Source and image: NOAA)