NOAA Office of Satellite and Product Operations
eclipse

Fall 2018 GOES Eclipse Schedule

KOZ (KEEP OUT ZONE) / ECLIPSE
GOES satellites encounter two periods during the year in which they are in Earth's shadow. Known as the Eclipse (ECL) season, these periods require the spacecraft to be completely dependent upon batteries for a maximum of 72 minutes daily. Eclipses occur approximately from late February to mid-April, and from late August to mid-October.

GOES-13/14/15 - There is a significant risk of light from the sun 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 instances 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 2018 Schedule (GOES-West Only)
GOES Spring Schedules (Excel file xlsx or Adobe PDF)


GOES-West  –  GOES-15   (08/16/2018 - 10/20/2018)
  • Routine Imager (HTML)
    (Download Chart as Adobe PDF)
  • Routine Sounder (HTML)
    (Download Chart as Adobe PDF)


  • Previous Eclipse Schedules
  • Spring 2018
  • Fall 2017
  • Spring 2017
  • Fall 2016
  • Spring 2016

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

    GOES-East
    During eclipse season with the GOES-R satellite series, stray light contamination is visible approximately 45 minutes before and after satellite local midnight (~0500 UTC for GOES-East) which is approximately 45 days before and after the vernal (March 20, 2018) and autumnal (September 22, 2018) equinox, in the form of a vertical beam of light that is more intense at the end closer to the Sun. Stray light contamination is often prominent in the images of visible and near infrared bands (bands 1–6), although it can also be discerned in band 7 images. This is a normal occurrence for the ABI.

    Stray light contamination and truncated swaths during the GOES-East Fall 2018 eclipse season will be apparent on ABI imagery:
    Starting August 8, 2018 from approximately 0415 UTC - 0545 UTC each day in the Northern Hemisphere until September 22, 2018.
    Starting September 22, 2018 from approximately 0415 UTC - 0545 UTC each day in the Southern Hemisphere until November 6, 2018.

    During eclipse season with the GOES-R satellite series Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), solar intrusion into the lens assembly will result in localized blooming (false events) and saturation (blind regions) in the data. These effects will occur daily around the same time as the ABI (0415 UTC - 0545 UTC). The daily effects begin with many false events at the limb, which cover regions of varying size and location as the eclipse features move across the field of view. The false events will peak during the beginning and end of the eclipse season and the 20-second files will intermittently peak in size above 3-5 MB per file during false events, which is well above the average of ~0.3 MB per file.

    The increased number of false events can cause an overflow condition in the electronics which saturates the event processing. This saturation creates blind regions in the data outside of the areas impacted by the solar intrusion. The length of these temporary outages depends on the region, and is on the order of minutes. A blooming filter is being developed to remove the event spikes, although lightning detection outages will remain in the affected regions. A data quality product is under development to notify users of impacts during future eclipse seasons.