Subsets of geostationary satellite data over international observing network sites for studying the diurnal dynamics of energy, carbon, and water cycles

Abstract

Abstract. The latest generation of geostationary satellites provide Earth observations similar to widely used polar-orbiting sensors but at intervals as frequently as every 5–10 min, making them ideal for studying the diurnal dynamics of land–atmosphere interactions. The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) group created the GeoNEX datasets by collating data from several geostationary platforms, including GOES-16/17/18, Himawari-8/9, and GK-2A, and placing them on a common grid to facilitate use by the Earth science community. Here, we document the GeoNEX Coincident Ground Observations (GeCGO) dataset for terrestrial ecosystem studies and provide examples for its use. Currently, GeCGO provides GOES-16 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) data over a 10 km × 10 km area surrounding 1586 network sites across the Americas. GeCGO makes it easy to compare the time series of geostationary data with the diurnal ground observations, including carbon/water fluxes and aerosol optical depth, and is extensible to other regions. We also develop GeoNEXTools to facilitate analyses that require both GeoNEX data and other NASA satellite data. The objectives of this paper are to introduce GeCGO and GeoNEXTools and demonstrate their applications. First, we describe the details of GeCGO and GeoNEXTools. Second, we explain how GeCGO can be integrated with other satellite data. Finally, we showcase comparisons between GeCGO and observations from three ground-based networks. GeCGO is available at https://doi.org/10.25966/y5pe-xp41 (Hashimoto et al., 2025).