TV weather folks are about to get a new toy to add to their forecast.

NASA has a planned launched this weekend of an Atlas V 541 rocket. That rocket will be carrying the newest weather satellite and prediction models will probably improve overnight.

If all goes well, the GOES-R satellite will launch from Cape Canaveral on Saturday afternoon atop the Atlas rocket.

It's the first of three satellites being built to replace the aging United States weather satellite system.
Once the satellite reaches orbit, it will change names from GOES-R to GOES-16 and become the 16th geostationary weather satellite in US history.

"This spacecraft will impact 300 million people a day," said Tim Gasparrini, the GOES-R project manager and employee of Lockheed Martin, which assembled the satellite. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are leading the effort.

The first geostationary weather satellite images were "grainy, very low-resolution; they are going to be absolutely nothing like the images you are going to be seeing off of GOES-R once it gets launched," Gasparrini said.

With these improved detailed pictures and measurements of the atmosphere, the forecast models will have more precise data. This will not only help scientists with your day-to-day forecast, it will help with tracking severe storms and creating better hurricane forecast tracks.

GOES-R will be able to capture all the details of US weather in the same time it takes the current GOES satellites to produce one small image of a stormy region.

So get the promotion team ready and even though this new satellite will be available to all, you can promote it like it's your own.

The viewers will never know.

H/T CNN