{"id":807433,"date":"2026-07-17T08:07:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T08:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/807433\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T08:07:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T08:07:22","slug":"critical-weather-satellite-returning-to-duty-after-major-malfunction-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/807433\/","title":{"rendered":"Critical weather satellite returning to duty after major malfunction"},"content":{"rendered":"

The weather satellite keeping tabs on skies<\/a> over much of Canada should return to service late Thursday after a day-long outage.<\/p>\n

GOES-19 experienced a significant anomaly on Wednesday that sent the satellite into safety mode to protect the systems and instruments aboard.<\/p>\n

Operating under the name GOES-East<\/a>, the satellite\u2019s geostationary orbit high above the equator offers an optimal view of much of North America, South America, and the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

DON’T MISS: Brand new satellite begins watching over Canada into the 2030s<\/a><\/p>\n

A major outage on Wednesday<\/p>\n

NOAA has not yet announced what exactly went wrong with the satellite, only saying that it experienced an anomaly around 4:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday and that it was no longer transmitting data.<\/p>\n

\"GOES<\/p>\n

Engineers and scientists worked to resolve the problem, announcing late Thursday morning that they’d fixed the problem and that systems would slowly return to normal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe GOES-19 Safehold has been resolved and engineers are working to prepare for restart of the onboard instruments,\u201d NOAA\u2019s Office of Satellite and Product Operations posted on Thursday afternoon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Visible, infrared, and water vapour imagery should return to service around 3:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday, the agency said in its update.<\/p>\n

The outage couldn\u2019t have come at a worse time as exceptionally thick wildfire smoke<\/a> from blazes in Ontario and Minnesota blankets southern Ontario<\/a> and the U.S. Northeast. Satellites are a crucial tool for tracking the coverage and intensity of wildfire smoke.<\/p>\n

\"(NOAA)<\/p>\n

\nThe current location of GOES satellites, including several decommissioned vehicles waiting on standby. (NOAA)<\/p>\n

Satellite data also feeds into weather models to help these computer programs produce more accurate guidance for forecasters.<\/p>\n

We’re not completely in the dark during lengthy outages.<\/p>\n

GOES-West and Europe’s Meteosat-9 offer some redundancy in the event of a complete GOES-East outage. Other satellites in polar orbits also provide occasional high-resolution imagery.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Canada plans to launch a dedicated WildFireSat<\/a> in 2029 to provide daily monitoring of fire activity across the country.<\/p>\n

GOES-19 is NOAA\u2019s newest weather satellite<\/p>\n

GOES-19 launched in June 2024 and officially took over as GOES-East in April 2025. This is the satellite\u2019s first major outage since it came into operational use.<\/p>\n

\"GOES<\/p>\n

Numerous advanced sensors work around the clock to monitor the atmosphere, Earth\u2019s surface, and the Sun.<\/p>\n

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) provides near-realtime visible, infrared, and water vapour imagery, which can update as frequently as every 30 seconds.<\/p>\n

Meteorologists also use the Global Lightning Mapper (GLM) to monitor lightning strikes within the satellite\u2019s field of vision. Not only does this capability help track thunderstorms outside of radar range, but it can reveal thunderstorms turning severe, as well as potential strengthening of tropical cyclones.<\/p>\n

WATCH: New weather satellite shares hi-res views of our beautiful planet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The weather satellite keeping tabs on skies over much of Canada should return to service late Thursday after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":806883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[49,48,71721,66,306,1133],"class_list":["post-807433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-clouds","tag-science","tag-space","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/806883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}