WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. (WAVY) — The antenna for the GOES-East weather satellite is nothing if not huge, as it communicates with a satellite close to 23,500 miles above the Earth’s equator.
About every 10 minutes, we get a new image of the Earth, and that data comes to the Wallops Command and Data Acquisition Station.
“Well, we’re the facility that ingests and processes and provides to the public for free,” said Jeff Krob, team lead at the Wallops Command and Data Acquisition Station. “And what I add is all public domain data, all of the satellite imagery and associated products that are developed from that imagery.”
GOES is the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite — it can see a full image from pole to pole, or provide detailed images that are just a few states wide for even better detail. There are two satellites, East and West, to provide coverage for the entire country.
These satellites operate day and night. It’s not just the visible light we are looking at, but the infrared, which is like peeling back the curtain for hurricane development.
“The pre-formation — they’re looking for the swirls in the low clouds,” Krob said. “Well, they look for those features at nighttime and using that infrared channel.”
For a place like this, having a backup is critical.
“We have a backup facility in Fairmont, West Virginia, in case we get severe weather here, like a hurricane, or something disastrous happens and we lose power,” Krob said.
Throughout the station, there are several backup generators and batteries that are able to keep the data flowing if shorter outages occur.
All of the data that the GOES-East and GOES-West captures — about seven terabytes a day — comes through this operations center, and if you want to see it anytime, it’s all free.