Because there is repeat coverage of the same location on the earth in a matter of 15 - 30 minutes during normal operating conditions, the GOES satellite is ideal for viewing the weather and it’s evolution. There are many scales of weather interaction and the GOES satellite provides the opportunity to view starting at the large scale with the full disk down to the mesoscale which we can look at with higher resolution in the visible imagery and coarser resolution in the infrared. Note the resolution is defined in reference to nadir, as if you were looking directly down to the earth at a 90 deg angle. The footprint that is viewed is larger as we go away from the equator and have larger viewing angles. It will also introduce a parallax effect which will make the top of the cloud appear at a different location than it actually is. We won’t be going into all the details about these effect right now. You will come across these concepts in other modules as the need to discuss them arises.