Field Campaign to calibrate and test GOES-16 ABI and GLM

GOES-16 began an eleven week period of field testing to calibrate the GOES-16 instruments on March 22nd, see this March 22nd press release from NASA/NOAA for more information The March 22nd press release says in part:

During this three-month campaign, a team of instrument scientists, meteorologists, GOES-16 engineers, and specialized pilots will use a variety of high-altitude planes, ground-based sensors, unmanned aircraft systems (or drones), the International Space Station, and the NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP polar-orbiting satellite to collect measurements across the United States . . . 

Although these data are collected on Earth, GOES-16’s operators will obtain similar measurements of the same locations using two of the satellite’s most revolutionary instruments—the Advanced Baseline Imager and the Geostationary Lightning Mapper. The data sets will be analyzed and compared to the data collected by the planes, drones, and sensors to validate and calibrate the instruments on the satellite.  (http://www.goes-r.gov/mission/fieldCampaignBegins.html)

 NOAA Satellites shared a very cool video on Youtube of a NASA ER-2 over the Sonoran Desert on a March 23rd flight to validate and calibrate the GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI):


Direct link to video

The first phase of the GOES-16 field campaign was over on April 11th. In phase two, from April 12 to May 18, 2017, the ER-2 was based out of  Robins Air Force Base in Georgia for calibration and validation of the GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM). See this press release for more information on the first and second phases.

In the following Facebook posts from the NOAA Satellites and Information Services you will hear from some scientists about the field campaign. The videos are short. The text explanations from the folk at NOAA Satellites and Information Service that accompany each video are, I feel important. I am not sure if I was able to successfully embed the video and the text, so I have included a direct link to each post. Added on September 25 2018, I was having trouble with the audio on the videos, even tried two browsers. If this happens to you, hover your mouse at the bottom of the video and click on the microphone icon at the bottom of the video and that should toggle the sound on and off. Or click on the direct link to each facebook post.

Frank Padula, GOES-16 Project Manager explains why they are using NASA’s ER2 Direct link to facebook post.



Meterologist talking about how they will use ER2 to calibrate GOES-16 Direct link to facebook post.



Field Campaign testing of the GOES-16 geostationary lightning mapper (GLM) Direct link to facebook post.