
GOES-17 ABI Mode 3 cooling timeline implementation
Photo credit: NOAA/Lockheed Martin


NOAA will commence operational implementation of the GOES-17 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) mode 3 cooling timeline in February 2021, affecting the ABI data distributed on EUMETCast.
22 July 2022
29 March 2021
This is to mitigate the number of saturated images resulting from the loop heat pipe (LHP) temperature regulation anomaly.
For more information, see: GOES-17 ABI Performance
This cooling timeline will occur seasonally in operations for four periods each year. Below is the remaining predicted period for 2021:
- 10 October–11 November 2021
During this period, every day between 06:00 and 12:00 UTC, GOES-17 operations mode will change from Mode 6 to Mode 3. This will affect the EUMETCast distribution of ABI data as follows:
- Full disc scans will be available every 15 minutes during the Mode 3 operations (instead of every 10 minutes for the Mode 6 operations).
- The change to Mode 3 also means that there will be a temporary filename change of GOES-17 ABI data:
- For Level 1B data, filenames will start with ‘OR_ABI-L1b-RadF-M3C<channel number>_G17_’ instead of ‘OR_ABI-L1b-RadF-M6<channel number>_G17_’
- For Level 2 products (All-Sky Radiance and Clear-Sky Radiance), ‘M6’ in the filenames will become ‘M3’:
All-Sky Radiance (ASR): ABI-L2-ASRF-M3_v2r1_g17_s202102260600359_e202102260611126_c202102260623060.bufr
Clear-Sky Radiance (CSR): ABI-L2-CSRF-M3_v2r1_g17_s202102260600359_e202102260611126_c202102260623050.bufr
GOES-17 L2 products (ASR/CSR) are missing every day in the window 10:30–17:00 UTC. The window in which they are missing every day varies and gets smaller towards the end and after the mode 3 cooling campaign.
Users wishing to receive the Mode 3 15-minute data should contact our User Service Helpdesk.