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To the best of my knowledge, this thing takes snapshots of its viewing field every 15 minutes. That'll be tremendously helpful for calibrating atmospheric and ocean models of ecosystem dynamics.

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Depends on the resolution and scan area you're talking about. I think the .5km can go off every 15min. But the 2km can go out every 5.

But that's nothing. IIRC, the Mesoscale (a 1000km x 1000km box somewhere in the hemisphere) can go out every 30s. On top of that, I believe you can snap a Meso without interrupting normal operations.

Here in the US, the idea of getting a snapshot of a Tropical Wave out every 30s during, say, hurricane season is very, very exciting.

And Japan recently launched another satellite with the same interval and resolution!

Similarly, the South Koreans have a geostationary satellite (GOCI) [0]. It's sampling interval is a bit lower (3 hourly) but has a high spatial resolution (500m).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_Ocean_Color_Imag...

The sampling interval of the Japanese and the European satellite is really interesting, though, because it allows to view more than half of earth in 15min intervals. We can see live the movement of clouds and typhoons around the earth.

This is really powerful.

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