Effective in November 2017, the National Environmental
Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) Geostationary Operational
Environmental Satellite (GOES)-16 will replace the existing operational GOES-13
at the GOES-East geosynchronous orbit location of 75 degrees west longitude.
The GOES-East location assignment was announced by NESDIS on May 25, 2017. The
specific date and time in November for the replacement has not been announced.
An updated Service Change Notice will be sent when the date is determined.
The NWS and NESDIS hosted two public Webinars in April
and August 2016 to identify and review the changes to the Emergency Managers
Weather Information Network (EMWIN) broadcasts with the introduction of
GOES-16. The Webinars also included time to receive and respond to participant
questions and comments regarding these changes. Participants included
individual users, emergency managers, third party emergency alert service
providers, media outlets and hardware and software manufacturers. The
presentations provided at these Webinars are available here:
The operational deployment of GOES-16 introduces three
changes to the GOES-East EMWIN broadcast impacting the reception and decoding
of products in the High Rate Information Transmission (HRIT)/EMWIN L-band
satellite broadcast data stream, as follows:
-HRIT/EMWIN Receiver: GOES-16 broadcasts the EMWIN and
the NESDIS HRIT data streams over a single transponder in a combined HRIT/EMWIN
format. EMWIN receive stations will need to be updated with an HRIT/EMWIN
receiver and antenna system to receive and decode the EMWIN data stream from
the HRIT/EMWIN broadcast.
-Full-File Format: The products on the EMWIN segment of
the GOES-16 HRIT/EMWIN broadcast are sent as complete files,
in contrast to the Quick Block Transfer (QBT) packet format employed on the
GOES-13 EMWIN broadcast. Software updates may be required to properly handle
this new full-file format.
-File Name Change: The file name assigned to each of the
full- file products on the EMWIN segment of the HRIT/EMWIN broadcast will
contain 63 to 66 alpha-numeric characters followed by a period and a three
character file extension. The new file name convention is online at:
The GOES-16 satellite is now in orbit at a service
check-out location (89.5 degrees west longitude) until November 2017. The satellite's HRIT/EMWIN transponder is
active but may periodically be taken off line to accommodate other spacecraft
events. Users are encouraged to install and verify the operations of new or
updated HRIT/EMWIN receive equipment and software. The HRIT/EMWIN broadcast
should not be used for operations until GOES-16 is declared operational in
November 2017.
Questions or comments regarding these changes may be
emailed to the NWS EMWIN support staff at:
nws.emwin.support@noaa.gov.
