GOES-16 Composite Color of Dust Clouds over Texas

Dust clouds sweep across north-central Texas in this 1-km GOES-16 composite color animation from 2030 to 2310 UTC on February 23, 2017.

As this animation suggests, the ability of GOES-16's Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) to provide such high-resolution imagery in color will be a boon to meteorologists as it will make it easier for them to identify different atmospheric or meteorological phenomena, such as dust from other types of clouds. As shown here, the brown-colored dust is easy to differentiate from smaller, white clouds mixed in with it.

Composite color images from GOES-16 are created by combining data from three of ABI's 16-bands -- band 1 (blue visible), band 2 (red visible) and band 3 (near-infrared vegetation) -- to produce a range of colors within visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum (think the colors of the rainbow, ROYGBIV).

Credit: NOAA/NASA

Note: This is preliminary, non-operational data as GOES-16 undergoes on-orbit testing.