NOAA Office of Satellite and Product Operations

GOES Eclipse Schedules - Fall 2015

KOZ (KEEP OUT ZONE) / ECLIPSE
The GOES satellites encounter two periods, during the year, in which the satellites are in the Earth's shadow. Known as the Eclipse (ECL) season, these periods require the spacecraft to be totally dependent on onboard batteries for a maximum of 72 minutes daily. Eclipse's occur from about February 28 - April 11 and August 18 - October 13.

GOES-13/14/15 - There is a significant risk of the sun light directly entering the scanners and causing degraded products, as the spacecraft enters and leaves the Earth's shadow, requiring a special algorithm to be applied to the Imager products. In some cases shifting or cancelling the frame is necessary. This is known as the "Stray Light Zone (SLZ)". The seasonal charts describe the GOES-East and GOES-West Imager and Sounder scan frames that are canceled or shifted, due to SLZ.


Seasonal Charts:   Fall 2015 Schedule
GOES Fall Schedules (Excel file xls or xlsx)

GOES-West  –  GOES-15   (8/18/2015 – 09/29/2015)
  • Routine Imager (HTML)
    (Download Chart in Adobe PDF)
  • Routine Sounder (HTML)
    (Download Chart in Adobe PDF)
  • Both Imager and Sounder (Excel file xls or xlsx)


  • Previous Eclipse Schedules
  • Spring 2015
  • Fall 2014
  • Spring 2014
  • Fall 2013
  • GOES-East  –  GOES-13   (8/19/2015 – 10/15/2015)
  • Routine Imager (HTML)
      (Download Chart in Adobe PDF)
  • Routine Sounder (HTML)
      (Download Chart in Adobe PDF)
  • Both Imager and Sounder (Excel file xls or xlsx)


  • Full Disk Scan During Eclipse
    There will be no Full Disk Coverage for GOES East or GOES West
    this eclipse season since we will not have an outage of more
    than 15 minutes.