The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-R series has 16 spectral bands. Two bands are in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, four are in the near-infrared, and ten are in the infrared. The ABI is similar to advanced geostationary imagers on other international satellite missions, such as the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) on Himawari-8 and-9. Operational meteorologists can investigate imagery from the ABI to better understand the state and evolution of the atmosphere. Various uses of the ABI spectral bands are described. GOES-R was launched on 19 November 2016 and became GOES-16 upon reaching geostationary orbit. GOES-16 is the first in a series of four spacecraft that will host ABI. GOES-16 became operational on 18 December 2017, in the GOES-East location. The ABI improvement is two orders of magnitude more than the legacy GOES imager due to more spectral bands and finer spatial and temporal resolutions.

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The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite‐R (GOES‐R) series started a new era for the U.S. geostationary satellite observing system. The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the GOES‐R series has fine temporal (30 s to 10 min) and spatial resolutions (0.5–2 km), and 16 spectral bands. However, due to the lack of an infrared sounder, the ABI is used to continue the legacy atmospheric profile (LAP) products that the previous GOES Sounder has, including the legacy atmospheric moisture profile, legacy atmospheric temperature profile, total precipitable water, layered precipitable water, and derived atmospheric stability indices. The ABI LAP retrieval algorithms have been developed under the GOES‐R series Algorithm Working Group (AWG) program funded by the GOES‐R Program Office. The LAP products from GOES‐16 have been operational and validated with a series of reference data sets including radiosonde observations, the Global Positioning System from SuomiNet, the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 total precipitable water measurements, as well as global operational analysis from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts models, for almost a year (from 2017 to 2018) to assure the data quality for applications. In addition, the LAP products have been successfully demonstrated at the Hazardous Weather Testbed experiments in the summer of 2017 and the spring of 2018. Both validation results and Hazardous Weather Testbed demonstrations indicate that the GOES‐R series LAP products meet the product requirements and provide added value over NWP short‐range forecasts, especially for middle‐upper tropospheric moisture, in situation awareness and nowcasting.

This paper introduces a method of image filtering for viewing gravity waves in satellite imagery, which is particularly timely to the advent of the next-generation Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) and the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI). Applying a “high pass” filter to the upper-troposphere water vapor channel reveals sub-Kelvin-degree variations in brightness temperature that depict an abundance of gravity wave activity at the AHI/ABI sensitivity. Three examples demonstrate that this high-pass product can be exploited in a forecasting setting to identify possible varieties of turbulence-prone gravity waves that either 1) move roughly orthogonally to the apparent background flow or 2) produce interference as separate wave packets pass through the same location.