Jamese Sims

It’s a career that reaches to the sky and touches everyday lives.

The work that Jamese Sims does contributes to what’s called the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R Series.

It’s a soaringly ambitious project — and it’s the outgrowth of a collaboration between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Any description of this work becomes dense with details — and fast.

The satellites are designed to “provide continuous imagery and atmospheric measurements of Earth’s Western Hemisphere,” according to the website www.goes-r.gov. The site also says the satellites provide “space weather monitoring to provide critical atmospheric, hydrologic, oceanic, climatic, solar and space data.”

Jamese Sims plays a big role within those lofty tasks as the satellite product manager (algorithm engineer) for the GOES-R Series. Employed by NOAA, Sims is a voting panelist on validation reviews for GOES-R baseline products — products which could be images, graphs, and various other kinds of data. As she explained it, she also “provides direction and oversight of new satellite product development and baseline product major enhancements.”

And the information coming from the GOES-R series may be more powerful and helpful than weather data has ever been before.

“This new generation of satellites has a much higher resolution so you’ll be able to see a lot more detail, and we also have much faster scans,” said Sims, who grew up in Meridian. “We get full-disk imagery every 15 minutes.”

And there’s more. Sims said, too, that an instrument called a “geostationary lightning mapper,” aboard the satellites, helps detect lightning in severe storms and — in so doing — helps to reveal the intensity of the storm.

The GOES-R Series also helped to create vivid images of the solar eclipse this past August.