Jan. 24 (UPI) -- The first of NOAA's new generation of weather satellites, GOES-16, has beamed back its first images. The full-color images of Earth's Western Hemisphere were captured by the satellite's high-resolution camera, the Advanced Baseline Imager.
GOES is short for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, while the number 16 alludes to the ABI's ability to observe radiation across 16 spectral bands. Spectral bands or channels describe the range of energies carried by different wavelengths. The ABI's range includes two visible bands, four near-infrared bands and ten infrared bands.