The western U.S. is about to get a fancy new weather satellite

It's the West's turn to get its own "eye in the sky."

The USA's newest weather satellite — scheduled for launch Thursday aboard a rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida — will keep a close watch over the storms in the western U.S. once it becomes fully functional later this year.

It's "the most sophisticated weather forecast technology ever flown in space," said Ajay Mehta of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that oversees the satellite program.

Known as GOES-S, it’s the second member of a new generation of weather satellites, and will join its twin GOES-16 (aka GOES-East) that's currently hovering above the eastern U.S. GOES stands for geostationary operational environmental satellite, which means the satellite hovers over one spot on Earth, moving along with the planet's rotation some 22,000 miles above the surface.