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The Unidata Program Center has received notification that NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite GOES-12 (currently in the GOES-South position, formerly covering the GOES-East position) will be decommissioned on August 16, 2013. The impacts of this decommissioning include:
- Loss of GOES-South scans in Unidata-Wisconsin (LDM/IDD datastream UNIWISC, aka MCIDAS) east image sectors.
- Cessation of ADDE access to GOES-South imagery.
Imagery from South America is still available from the GOES-East full-disk scans, which are created every three hours.
GOES-12 has served the atmospheric and space science communities since it began operations on April 1, 2003. It has been providing coverage of South American since it was moved from the GOES-East position in May of 2010.
GOES-12 is the last of the second generation GOES satellites still in use. Three third generation satellites — GOES-13, GOES-14, and GOES-15 — are currently in use. The first fourth generation GOES satellite (named GOES-R until it becomes operational) is scheduled for launch in 2015.
The text of the notice from NOAA follows:
From: Natalia Donoho - NOAA Federal
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 11:01:01 -0400
Subject: Administrative: Notification of GOES-12 (GOES-South America)
Decommissioning Date, Issued: July 9, 2013, 1500 UTC
Topic: Notification of GOES-12 (GOES-South America) Decommissioning
Date/Time Issued: July 9, 2013 1500 UTC
Product(s) or Data Impacted: GOES-12, All Instruments
Date/Time of Initial Impact: August 16, 2013
Date/Time of Expected End: N/A
Length of Outage: N/A
Details/Specifics of Change: GOES-12 is scheduled to be decommissioned on August 16, 2013. GOES-12 was launched on July 23, 2001, and it has supported South America at 60W since May 2010.
The spacecraft engineering team in the The Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO) was granted approval from NESDIS headquarters to proceed with plans to decommission the spacecraft after evaluating its health and ability to provide meaningful data to the scientific and weather community.
Contact Information for Further Information: ESPC Operations at ESPCOperations@noaa.gov at (301) 817-3880
Web Site(s) for applicable information see:
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/SATS/messages.html
for this and other satellite related messages.
See:
http://www.oso.noaa.gov/goesstatus/spacecraftStatusSummary.asp?spacecraft=12
for GOES-12 spacecraft status summary.
See:
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/SATS/GOES/SA/
for GOES-12 Information.
