GOES-13 satellite outage

GOES-13 satellite outage
In case you were wondering why there were no Caribbean, Tropical Atlantic and E Ir Water Vapor images, in today's weather forecast:
The imaging instrument on NOAA's geostationary satellite that provides regular images every 15 minutes for the Eastern U.S. and Atlantic Ocean, GOES-13, has been experiencing an increasing amount of noise in the signal since September 12. The noise got so bad on Sunday night that the instrument was placed in stand-by mode, and engineers are attempting to troubleshoot the problem. GOES-15, the geostationary satellite that covers the Western U.S. and Eastern Pacific, is now taking images of all of North America to help compensate. However, there is no regular 15-minute satellite imagery available for most of the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean. September is a bad time to be without satellite imagery over the Atlantic, but fortunately, there are not any threat areas in the Atlantic we are currently worried about. The CIMSS Satellite Blog has more information on the outage, and also has links to polar orbiting satellite imagery over the region where we do not have geostationary data. The loss of GOES-13 data will degrade the accuracy of the computer forecast models for the globe, particularly over the Atlantic, for the duration of the outage.