GOES-8 Results last updated 18 June 2004

Table of Contents

• Operational Results
• Semi-Operational Results
• Early Infrared Sounding Data
• Early Multi-Spectral Images
• Early Visible Images
• Early Infrared Images
• First Infrared Image
• First Visible Image
• Eclipse Images

Tribute to GOES-8 at the University of Wisconsin

Operational Results

• The Presidents Day snowstorm (5.0 MB QT) peaked on 17 February 2003. First using moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, and then as a nor'easter drawing moisture from the Atlantic, the storm dropped 2 feet of snow, paralyzing the Mid-Atlantic region for days. This was the third big "Presidents Day snowstorm" to hit Washington DC in the last 25 years.
• Toronto, the urban heat island (0.5 MB GIF) at 1745 UTC on 7 February 2003. The eastern rim of Lake Ontario is urbanized. In reflected sunlight, this area appears dark in winter, since there is less open snow. In the far thermal infrared (4 and 11 microns), the area appears warmer (darker) by 5 to 10 C, with a clear concentration on downtown Toronto, even at low resolution (approximately 8 km per pixel at this latitude seen from GOES-8). The unfrozen lake unexpectedly appears much colder at 4 microns than at 11 microns; we expect similar temperature readings.
• Montserrat smokes again (3.2 MB QT) 27 January 2003. Actually, the volcanic island was fuming for weeks before.
• Great Lakes on a cold winter night (0.5 MB JPG) 27 January 2003 at 0332 UTC (9:30 pm CST).
  Q: What do the Great Lakes do for fun in winter?
  A: Snow all over their neighbors!
• Gravity Waves over Mexico (0.4 MB GIF) 2208 UTC on 16 December 2002. Gravity waves are not so common in the sub-tropics, but the late afternoon sun reveals a long washboard of them in an early winter jet above Mexico City.
• San Cristobal volcano, Nicaragua (0.8 MB QT) 1345-1745 UTC, on 16 December 2002. Dawn reveals an ash and steam plume blowing to the west.
• Midwest snow streak (0.5 MB JPG) at 2115 UTC on 6 December 2002. This GOES-8 visible light panoramic image reveals a cross-country streak of early winter snowfall from Oklahoma to New York that paralyzed the middle of the nation earlier in the week, with at least 20 dead and a few million without power.
• Midwest Tornado Outbreak (4.0 MB QT), 10-11 November 2002. At least 35 people were killed in more than 70 tornadoes that raged through the night from Ohio to Mississippi. Several small towns in central Tennessee were particularly hard hit. The GOES animation is enhanced infrared imagery on a color map.
• El Reventador ("The Destroyer") Volcano spouts ash in Ecuador (1.4 MB QT) on 4 November 2002. It dumped ash onto Ecuador's capital, Quito, and cut the electric power supply there. By the end of the day, the ash plume vanishes into the daily thunderstorms along the equator.
• Corpus Christi Tornadoes (1.8 MB QT) on 24 October 2002. At least 3 coastal zone tornadoes occurred in this late afternoon southern Texas storm that caught everyone by surprise. One person was killed, 14 were injured, damage was $50-$100 M. One touchdown was reported at 3:45-4:00 pm local time (2045-2100 UTC). The GOES-8 satellite was in a routine scanning mode, providing only a few images per hour.
• Hurricane Lili (9.8 MB QT) 27 September - 4 October 2002. The storm achieved category 4 status on October 3 while in mid-Gulf, but weakened sharply just before coming ashore west of New Orleans.
• Hurricane Isidore (11.0 MB QT) 20-27 September 2002. The storm achieved category 4 status and messed up western Cuba before blowing itself out over Yucatan, and then drifted across the Gulf of Mexico to flood New Orleans with 3 to 4 feet of water.
• Quebec WildFires - Multi-spectral color (0.2 MB JPG) at 2140 UTC on 6 July 2002. Smoke and clouds observed in the visible channel is overlaid on a color background map, and the hot spots observed in the 4 micron infrared channel are overlaid in red.
• Quebec WildFires - Smoke over USA (1.4 MB QT) 6-7 July 2002, animated using the GOES-8 visible channel. The smoke from the huge fires in north-central Quebec, Canada, drift over the northeastern USA, darkening the skies from Boston to Washington DC. A low pressure area over eastern Canada produces the counter-clockwise flow that brings down Canadian air into the USA.
• Quebec WildFires - Infrared view (1.9 MB QT) 5-7 July 2002, animated using the GOES-8 4 micron infrared channel. The brightness scale was inverted so that cold clouds appear white and warm land appears grey, and hot spots (fires) appear black. Despite the poor spatial resolution at this high latitude (approximately 8 km or 5 miles) the extensive outbreak east of James Bay is very evident, day and night.
• Arizona WildFires (7.6 MB QT) 22-24 June 2002. This 48-hour long movie spans 3 days of out-of-control burning in eastern Arizona, as seen in the GOES-8 visible channel.
• Okefenokee Fire (0.8 MB QT) burned in over 100,000 acres of the wildlife preserve on the Georgia-Florida border, covering a large part of northern Florida with smoke on 28 May 2002.
• Storms and tornadoes move across the Chesapeake (2.4 MB QT) on 28 April 2002. The storms can be followed into the night using the lower resolution thermal infrared channel, as in this movie of the Mid-Atlantic ares overlaid on a color background (4.0 MB QT).
  The afternoon wave ended with a tornado that ripped apart the town of La Plata, Maryland, about 20 miles south of Washington DC. Here are links to some Photoshop (2.0 MB) and GIF (0.2 MB) formatted close-up 640x480 images from the 2302 UTC frame that captured a snapshot of the bubbling cloud over La Plata MD.

• Late winter in the Midwest (1.4 MB GIF) at 1745 on 3 March 2002. As in prevous views (just below), the rivers and reservoirs of the Midwest present a stark landscape just after a late winter blizzard.
• Midwest Riverscape (0.4 MB GIF) at 1732 UTC on 8 February 2002. The dark river valleys of Illinois and Iowa stand out in the snowy landscape, while the frozen lakes of Wisconsin and Minnesota provide the opposite white-on-black look.
• Odometer image 0202020202 (0.1 MB JPEG) at 0202 UTC on 2 February 2002. There is nothing remarkable about this multi-spectral infrared image from GOES-8 late in the evening on the East Coast, other than the fact that it was taken on the 2nd minute of the 2nd hour of the 2nd day of the 2nd month of the 2nd year of the 2nd (oops, 3rd) millennium.
• Midwest Snow-belt (1.3 MB GIF) at 1745 UTC on 1 February 2002. A large, fresh snow belt is apparent from Colorado to Michigan the day after a bad blizzard paralyzed the Midwest.
• Mid-Atlantic Snow (0.3 MB JPEG) at 1645 on 4 January 2002. The first snowfall of the year highlights the terrain along the Southeast coast.
• New Year Cold Start (0.9 MB JPEG) at 1745 GMT on 1 January 2002. The midday visible image from GOES-8 reveals a cold air outbreak across the continental USA, with relatively clear conditions over a 3600-pixel panorama from the eastern Rockies to Nova Scotia. The scene is dominated by the snow that continues to blow off the Great Lakes, following a week with a 7-foot snowfall in Buffalo, New York.
• Montserrat Erupts (0.4 MB QT), 1700-2100 GMT on 28 December 2001.
• Tornadoes across the South (4.3 MB QT), on 24 November 2001. At least 11 people were killed in sparsely populated parts of Mississippi and Alabama.
• Hurricane Michelle (10 MB QT), 1-5 November 2001. The images are enhanced combinations of the GOES-8 visible and infrared images on a color map background. The animation demonstrates how a tropical storm gathers power from the warm waters if left undisturbed for a few days, and how it quickly falls part when blown over land (Cuba).
• Hurricane Michelle in the Caribbean (0.3 MB JPEG) at 1745 UTC on 2 November 2001.
• Hurricane Karen eyes Nova Scotia (0.2 MB JPEG) at 1445 UTC on 13 October 2001. Sure enough, the storm blew north through the Canadian maritime provinces.
• Hurricane Iris in the Caribbean (0.5 MB GIF) at 1445 UTC on 8 October 2001. Iris' landfall was poorly predicted. When it came ashore, it killed a boat full of American scuba divers anchored in a Belize waterway.
• Tornado in College Park, MD and Hurricane Humberto (0.4 MB GIF) at 2115 UTC on 24 September 2001. Image acquisition began near the north pole at 2115 UTC, which gave GOES-8 time to scan the overshooting cloudtop northeast of the District of Columbia about 10 minutes later while the tornado was occurring. Coincidentally, Hurricane Humberto was well out to sea at the same latitude as the tornado, demonstrating the enormous difference in scale between these two kinds of severe storms.
• Tornado in College Park, MD on 24 September 2001. Because of the GOES-8 operational scanning schedule, the satellite image just before the tornado was 30 minutes old, so that GOES was not able to provide a timely warning.
  • Tornado in College Park, MD (sharpened 0.6 MB QT)
  • Tornado in College Park, MD (smooth 1.1 MB QT)
  • Tornado in College Park, MD (2.5 MB GIF animation)
  Tornadic winds whipped through the University of Maryland between 2115 and 2130 UTC (5:15 to 5:30 EDT), killing two students by hurling their car into a tree. The tornadic destruction began just 1 block from the GOES project scientist's home, and the deaths occurred 4 blocks away. He was impressed. A picture of the funnel cloud taken from a balcony two miles north was published by the Washington Post. A picture of "ground zero" was published by the Baltimore Sun.
• Gabrielle and Felix (0.2 MB JPEG) at 1745 GMT on 16 September 2001. Gabrielle did not achieve hurricane status over land, but it dumped a foot of rain on Florida. Felix was a hurricane, but it never left mid-Atlantic.
• Hurricane Erin and the NY Twin Towers (0.7 MB GIF) at 1349 UTC on 11 September 2001. Because of the fine weather west of the hurricane, the smoke from the Twin Towers in New York is visible even at GOES distance, although the pixel resolution is only 1.5 km (1.0 mile).
• NY Twin Towers movie (0.6 MB QT) 11 September 2001. The gain is turned 'way up to make this movie of the New York area. At this latitude, the GOES-8 visible pixels have about 1.5 km (1.0 mile) resolution. The white puffs from the collapsing World Trade Center buildings are visible in the frames from 1400 to 1530 UCT (10:00 to 11:30 am EDT).
• Hurricane Erin brushes Bermuda (0.1 MB JPEG) at 1300 UTC on 10 September 2001. The color in this multispectral image is derived from the visible and infrared channels, while the luminosity detail is derived from the visible channel.
• Deforestation in Brazil (0.2 MB GIF) at 1515 UTC on 8 August 2001. This image in the visible channel was taken by GOES-8 almost 7 years after a similar picture in 1994.
• Tungurahua erupts in Ecuador (0.3 MB GIF) 7 August 2001 at 2236 UTC. This visible image was brightened by a factor of 20 to show the ash plume near sunset.
• Tropical storm Barry (4 MB QT) 5-6 August 2001. The storm fell a few mph shy of being an official hurricane, despite a great many impulsive outbreaks just before it came ashore in the Florida panhandle. The visible and infrared images from GOES-8 were enhanced and blended, and placed on top of a color map to make a two day animation.
• Midwest tornadic line (11 MB QT) during the afternoon of 14 June 2001. This line of thunderstorms produced 45 reported tornadoes and hundreds of cases of high winds and large hail from Texas to Minnesota. The GOES-8 visible imagery comes at 5 to 10 minute intervals. The contrast-enhanced images contain nice examples of high-altiitude ripples (gravity waves) moving out from overshooting cloudtops.
• Tropical Storm Allison (36 MB QT) 4-14 June 2001, 10 days at 4 km resolution. and Tropical Storm Allison (14 MB QT) 4-17 June 2001, 14 days at 8 km resolution. While not windy enough to be called a hurricane, the storm dropped many inches of rain every day for two weeks, flooded Houston, killed 25 people, and did more than $1 billion in flood damage in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania. The line of tornadoes in the midwest is captured on June 14th in the longer low-resolution movie. The clouds in this movie are a combination of visible and infrared channels from GOES-8, superimposed on a green-land, blue-water thematic background map from LANDSAT. These long movies consist of over one-thousand frames.
• Florida's great Mallory Swamp fire in color (16 MB QT) 24-26 May 2001. The background color map is a LANDSAT classification of surface types in Florida. Overlaid are GOES multispectral images: 1) visible channel clouds during the day, 2) 11 micron infrared channel clouds during the night, and 3) 4 micron infrared channel hot spots, color-coded in red. The jitter in the fire location is due to the shakey GOES-8 platform, which had one of its three-axis momentum wheels fail years ago, and is now ballancing using a small spare wheel.
• Florida's great Mallory Swamp fire (12 MB QT) 23-26 May 2001. This is a 4-day animation of a fire that began 14 May 2001, and is credited as being one of the largest wildfires in Florida's history. The continuously clear weather in the spring 2001 contributed to a massive drought in northern Florida that made such fires very difficult to control.
• Popo puffs in the night (0.8 MB QT) 17 April 2001. The 11-12 micron split window distinguishes the volcanic ash as a bright cloud drifting southwest from the Popocatepetl volcano near Mexico City out over Pacific Ocean. In animation, the spectral difference captures the traces of ash long after the cloud becomes indistinguishable in the primary infrared channels.
• Snow melt in the midwest (2.0 MB QT) on 13 April 2001. A nasty late winter storm left a swath of snow from the Colorado Rockies across Nebraska and into Minnesota, which the April sun largely melted away in a day.
• Urban heat islands in the uppermidwest (0.3 MB GIF) at 1745 UTC on 27 March 2001. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area is an enormous warm island, and many of the smaller cities like Fargo, ND are apparent. If you look hard, you can even see the effect of the I90 interstate highway just north of the Iowa border in the visible panel. For the infrared panel of this illustration, the 4 km resolution of the 11 micron channel was blown up 4x to make it the same size as the 1 km resolution visible.
• Fly Florida (0.3 MB GIF) at 1315 UTC on 23 February 2001. The early morning aircraft flights in and out of Orlando and Miami leave a dense tracery of contrails and their shadows over northern Florida in this enhanced visible image.
• Popocatepetl volcano smokes (0.3 MB GIF) late in the afternoon, at 2244 UTC on 30 January 2001.
• Popocatepetl volcano explodes (0.7 MB QT) on the afternoon 22 January 2001. The large pancake-shaped cloud casts an enormous shadow near sunset in this contrast-enhanced movie made from the operational GOES-8 visible imagery.
• Montserrat Smokes (0.4 MB QT) on 26 December 2000. The southern end of the island "lets off steam" the day after Xmas.
• Popo smokes Mexico (6.1 MB QT) on 13-19 December 2000. The movie is made from operational GOES-8 visible images. The volcano works up to a major outpouring by the 19th.
• The day after the midwest blizzard (0.4 MB JPG) at 1615 UTC on 12 December 2000. This colorful multipsectral composite was constructed from the visible channel (red), the 4 micron infrared channel (blue), and the 11 micron infrared channel (green). The net effect is to separate the appearance of snow on the ground from low clouds and high clouds. This day, there is still a lot of lake-effect snowfall coming down out of the low (yellowish) clouds southeast of the great lakes, piling up well over 12 inches of snow.
• Watching snow melt in North Carolina (1.3 MB QT) on 4 December 2000. The previous day's first snowstorm of the winter made a high-contrast "print" of the topography, and you can see the snow-covered region shrink during the day..
• Fog in California's San Fernando Valley (1.3 MB QT) on Sunday, 3 December 2000. The low clouds and fog persisted all day in this time-series of enhanced visible frames collected by GOES-8.
• Solar flare makes sparkles in GOES image on 9 November 2000. The visible detectors are sensitive to energetic electrons, which cause bit-flips in the 10-bit digital words used for the pixels. It is easiest to see over the dark oceans around Cuba.
• Fire in the Shenandoah National Park (0.6 MByte QT) on a beautiful but dry Sunday afternoon on 5 November 2000. This is a real time greyscale movie using the GOES visible channel.
  In post-processing, we made a colorized version of the wildfire in the Shenandoah - color (7.0 MB QT). These images are an enhanced blend of the visible and long-wave infrared GOES channels. The short-wave infrared channel is also enhanced, colored red for the hottest pixels to show the fire at the base of smoke plume. The fire is not large enough to light up more than one 4 km pixel, so it shows up as a red dot that flares up early in the day, followed by the big smoke plume later in the day. The color background is a natural-looking land-classification map: green for forests, yellowish orange for prairie, blue for lakes & ocean, grey-blue for urban areas. The geo-political boundaries are grey lines.
• Michael, blow the boat ashore (0.2 MByte JPG) on 19 October 2000. This storm quickly intensified over the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, achieving 100 mph winds as it approached Newfoundland. Tropical storm Nadine is directly south of Michael, joined by a weather front that pushed off North America, and is expected to carry Nadine northwest from her current location. These late-season storms are much like the big one described in "The Perfect Storm", with explosive growth when they move over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream ventilated by the early winter surges from Canada. This image is a color-composite of the GOES visible channel and two thermal infrared channels at 1745 UTC.
• Hurricane Michael at sea (0.2 MByte GIF) at 2345 UTC on 18 October 2000. This storm suddenly acquired hurricane status far out in the Gulf Stream east of Bermuda and scurried into the North Atlantic during the night.
• Hurricane Keith batters Belize (0.2 MByte JPG) at 1745 UTC on 1 October 2000. The 135-mph winds with higher gusts make Keith a category-4 hurricane on the Saffir/Simpson hurricane scale.
• Hurricanes Isaac and Joyce in mid-Atlantic (0.4 MByte JPG) at 1145 UTC on 28 September 2000. The two storms are about as different as two hurricanes can be.
• Hurricane Isaac at the entrance to hurricane alley in the mid-Atlantic (0.3 MByte GIF) at 1445 UTC on 24 September 2000.
• Hurricane Helene (0.4 MByte GIF) at 2145 UTC on 21 September 2000. At this time, the strong rain bands have been blown to the west, toward north-central Florida, while the low-level circulation center lies exposed and headed north towards the Florida Panhandle.
• Hurricane Gordon
  • Hurricane Gordon heads for shore (0.4 MByte GIF) at 2145 UTC on 17 September 2000. You can the open core at sea, the heavy rain clouds in the northwest quadrant of the storm approaching the coastline of the Florida panhandle, plus the long shadows cast by the high cirrus across northern Florida.
  • Hurricane Gordon's explosive growth (1.8 MByte QT) on the afternoon of 16 September 2000, creates a huge new cirrus cloud shield in just 4 hours.
  • Gravity waves in Hurricane Gordon (0.3 MByte GIF) at 2202 UTC on 16 September 2000. An explosive convective tower in the middle of the storm popped up a few hours earlier, sending out dozens of gravity waves in the atmosphere, like ripples in a pond.
• Hurricane Florence off the Carolinas (0.5 MByte GIF) at 1645 UTC on 13 September 2000. Two deaths were attributed to Florence due to drowning in heavy surf on the Carolina shores.
• Hurricane Alberto in mid_Atlantic (0.2 MByte GIF) at 1445 UTC on 8 August 2000. The first of the Y2K season is barely strong enough to be called a hurricane.
• Lascar volcano erupts in Chile (3.5 MByte QT) on 20 July 2000. This movie presents the difference in brightness temperature between the 11 and 12 micron infrared channels, because the ash cloud give an anomalous positive difference.
  In a multi-channel view (24 MByte QT), one can see how the cloud is blown rapidly across Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. It thins and becomes hard to see as it approaches the airspace of the populated east coast of South America near Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
• The backlit Earth (0.5 MByte GIF) at 0600 UTC on 13 June 2000. The crescent Earth is backlit by the Sun just an hour after midnight, providing food for thought about the information from the light coming through the atmosphere.
• Springtime geography of the southeast USA at 1745 UTC on 9 April 2000. Because vegetation is not yet thick, much of the detailed geology of the southeast can be seen in this enhanced greyscale image. Many large swamps, forests and river valleys are apparent near the coast from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, and reservoirs abound in the interior.
• The Bahamas ocean bottom at 1745 UTC on 4 April 2000. On a clear day, you can see all the shallow reefs. These reefs are sometimes mis-classified as vegetated land by automated algorithms for LANDSAT data.
• Tornados rip Ft. Worth (0.8 MByte QT) 28 March 2000. At local sunset (approximately 0100 UTC, 29 March), two tornados ripped through Ft. Worth Texas, killing 2 people, injuring hundreds, and wreaking havoc on the glass-and-steel buildings downtown.
• Montserrat erupts at midnight (0.3 MByte QT) 20-21 March 2000. The volcanic cloud is color-coded where the infrared channels show significant differences in the apprent brightness of the cloud top, a characteristic signature of many volcanic clouds. In a remarkable coincidence, an isolated mid-level cloud from the northwest is blown right across the island just as the volcano erupts.
• Becalmed Galapagos 19 March 2000 at 2015 UTC. Near local noon near the equinox, large patches of calm ocean along the equator near the Galapagos Islands either catch the reflection of the sun (off-scale bright) or dark outer space (nearly black).
• Valentine's Day Tornados in Georgia (1.4 MByte QT) 14 February 2000. Twisters in the middle of the night ripped through four Georgia counties, wiping our Camilla GA, killing 18 people, injuring more than 100, and destroying more than 350 homes. This movie displays enhanced infrared images of the clouds in motion over a green-blue (land-water) background map.
• Sandstorm at sea 4 February 2000. Just after dawn, a dense sandstorm blowing off of Saharan north Africa covers all but the volcanic tops of the Cape Verde islands. By midday, the sand has settled out, revealing the islands as usual. This was the first of several big sandstorms that blew for most of a month into the Cape Verde Basin.
• Panorama after an east coast blizzard, the GOES-8 visible image captures the sweep of the snow-covered midwest and northeast in the grip of winter, at 1745 UTC on 26 January 2000. Approximately 12 inches of snow fell in the area around the Chesapeake Bay on the day before.
• A winter day in the arctic (3.6 MByte QT), 17-18 January 2000. This GOES-10 thermal infrared movie lets you see the weather during the long arctic night, as a big storm sweeps across Alaska, stirring up oragraphic clouds downwind of the mountain ranges. If you look closely, you can pick out several famous mountain tops as warm (dark) pixels. At 1644 UTC, a large meteor was registered at (145W, 62N), near Alaska's southeastern border with the Yukon territory, but there is no sign of any atmospheric after effects in the GOES-10 imagery.
• Chicago without snow 26 December 1999 at 1945 UTC. The day after Xmas, the Chicago area is an urban heat island. The urban area is snow-free and 5 C warmer than the surrounding countryside at this time, after a cold air outbreak.
• Snowy trail across the Midwest at 1745 UTC on 6 December 1999. A concentrated snow storm blew from Colorado to Lake Michigan leaving a narrow band of snow in its wake.
• Guagua Pichincha erupts in Ecuador (0.5 MByte QT) on 29 November 1999. The initial "bomb" casts a nice shadow on the equator at this time of year, and the ash cloud spreads out over half of Ecuador at high altitude over the next 6 hours in a wind form the north.
• Hurricane Lenny whips the Virgin Islands (2.2 MByte QT) 17 November 1999, with a prolonged direct hit on St. Croix. Despite the distance from Puerto Rico, Lenny also produced destructive flooding there.
• Hurricane Lenny eyes Jamaica at 1800 UTC on 14 November 1999. The late-season storm surprised forecasters by forming and moving to the east, towards Puerto Rico.
• Hurricane Jose in the Lesser Antilles at 1845 UTC on 20 October 1999. The storm unexpectedly strengthened to category 3 strength (100 mph winds).
• Hurricane Irene
  • Hurricane Irene three-day color movie (9 MByte QT) 15-18 October 1999
  • Irene off Cape Canaveral at 1945 UTC on 16 October 1999.
  • Irene in South Florida at 1445 UTC on 15 October 1999.
• Volcanic smoke ring in Ecuador (0.4 Mbyte QT) 7 October 1999. The volcano is called Guagua Pichincha, and it is located just 13 kilometers west of Quito, the capitol of Ecuador. The smoke-ring ash-cloud is blown westward by the low-level wind, while the mushroom ash-cloud is blown eastward by the high-level wind. Note that the snow-capped peak disappeared after the blast.
• Volcanic smoke ring in Ecuador, colorized (0.9 MByte QT) 7 October 1999. The infrared channels are used to distinguish the ash cloud (blue) from the normal watery clouds (yellowish-white) over a dark green background map.
• Hurricanes Hillary, Harvey and Gert low-resolution visible image at 1745 UTC on 20 September 1999.
• Hurricane Floyd
  • Floyd 5-day color movie (13.8 MB QT) 12-16 September 1999, made from a series of visible-infrared composite images on a color background map.
  • Hurricane Floyd in the Sargasso Sea at 1855 UTC on 12 September 1999. This is a GOES-8 visible-infrared composite on a color background map.
• Hurricane Dennis
  • Dennis color movie (19.1 MB QT) 24-30 August 1999. This is actually a visible-infrared composite on a color background map.
  • Dennis high-res movie (8.9 MB QT) during 28 August 1999. The movie is full-resolution visible imagery during the day from NOAA's routine observing schedule. It is puzzling that NOAA did not call for rapid scans of this very dynamic storm.
  • Dennis and Cindy eye each other at 1745 UTC on 28 August 1999. The color picture is an artsy combination of reflected visible light combined with thermal infrared channels at 4 and 11 microns.
  • Dennis and Cindy at sea at 1415 UTC on 25 August 1999.
• Hurricane Bret hits Texas at 2145 UTC on 22 August 1999. The visible and infrared channels were used to create the false-color image.
  • Hurricane Bret comes ashore in Texas (2.1 MByte QT) 22 August 1999. This storm quickly developed from a F1 to a F4 overnight, with a very well-developed eye by the time it came ashore on a sparsely populated section of the Texas coast.
• Montserrat erupts (1.6 MByte QT) 0900-1900 UTC on 20 July 1999. The movie is made from a composite of the 11 and 12 micron infrared channels, colorizing clouds that have an ash-like spectral signature.
• Urban heat islands everywhere, 2045 UTC on 5 July 1999. Hot areas appear dark in this 4 micron monochrome image of the eastern USA, demarking every large city, and even small cities like Ft. Wayne, Indiana.
• Tornado outbreak in western Iowa 16 May 1999. The storm was a mile-wide F4, but fortunately did not hit heavily populated areas.
• GOES-8, age 5, 11 May 1999. The first official GOES-8 visible image was taken five years earlier.
• Montserrat puffs 10 May 1999. One moderate eruption lifts ash high enought through the low-altitude easterlies to be caught in the mid-altitude westerlies.
• Killer tornado casts a long shadow over Oklahoma City at sunset, 0045 UTC 4 May 1999. The F4 force tornado was a half-mile wide, doing enormous damage around the city: killing 43 people, injuring more than 600 people, and destroying over 1,600 homes.
  • High resolution visible movie noon to sunset (1 MByte QT movie) 3 May 1999
  • Low resolution infrared movie noon to midnight (1 MByte QT movie) 3 May 1999
  • GOES-8/-10 red/green stereo image at 2345 UTC on 3 May 1999. Put the red lens of your 3-D glasses over your right eye, representing GOES-8, and the blue-green lens over your left eye, representing GOES-10.
  • Red-green stereo movie of May 3rd Oklahoma tornado. (3.3 MByte QT)
• Florida firestorms make convective towers and smoke plumes in the panhandle and in south-central region that look like thunderstorms late in the afternoon on 19 April 1999. The smoke in southern Florida closed major highways west of Miami.
  • We are experimenting with animated color composites for a Florida firestorm movie (3.1 MByte QT) 19 April 1999
• Killer tornados near Cincinnati (1.0 MByte QT movie) 9 April 1999. A blue-green map under-lays the time-series of GOES-8 enhanced infrared images taken during the early morning hours as a strong front moves up the Ohio river valley, killing 7 people and destroying 400 homes in the suburbs of Cincinnati.
• Not quite spring in the upper midwest and northeastern USA after a series of late winter storms leave snow and ice that can been seen from space and 16 March 1999.
• Winter cuts a swath across Washington DC on 10 March 1999, leaving a narrow corridor of 8-inch deep snow, seen here the next day at 1445 UTC, 11 March 1999. The March 9th forecast was for 2 to 4 inches, concentrated over Richmond, 100 miles to the south.
• Canadian high dominates eastern North America at 1515 UTC on 23 February 1999. Even the coast of Greenland shows bright and clear.
• Killer tornados in Arkansas (7.8 MByte QT movie) just after sunset on 21 January 1999. This GOES-8 false color movie uses sharpened thermal infrared overlaid on a blue-green ocean-land map, and blends in the sharper visible data during the day, using a yellow tint for the low clouds.
• Shear madness at the North African limb 14 January 1999. This has been there since 1995, but it is getting worse in 1999.
• Montserrat explodes at dawn (0.9 MByte QT movie) on 13 January 1999. The routine GOES-8 visible images are slightly contrast-enhanced to watch the ash cloud rise to 20,000 ft (6 km), and spread across the lesser Antilles.
• Two volcanos in Mexico show up as hot spots in the 4 micron channel at dawn (1400 UTC) on 25 November 1998. Both hot spots are much smaller than the 4 km footprint of the GOES IR detectors, so they appear as single pixels. It is a remarkable coincidence to see two active volcanos in the same satellite image: Volcan de Fuego southwest of Guadalajara, and Popocatepetl southeast of Mexico City. At this time, both mountains were merely hot and rumbling.
• Classic wind storm development (3.6 Mbyte QT movie) 9-10 November 1998. The unpredicted wind and snow storm raced across the upper midwest, closing highways, and damaging buildings and vehicles with gusts to 95 mph.
• GOES-8 watches John Glenn take off (0.5 MByte QT movie) on 29 October 1998. The sunny day casts a shadow of the rocket contrail on the Atlantic Ocean in the black and white movie, while the clear weather offers a nice false-color view of Florida at 1925 UTC.
• GOES-8 finds the Earth again (0.5 MByte QT movie) on 28 October 1998. The first few images are wobbly as the attitude control system spins up through the night.
• GOES-8 loses South America during the 0739 UTC scan on 27 October 1998. The satellite was put into safe-hold mode, and it was brought back on-line 16 hours later.
• Hurricane Mitch gallery
  • Hurricane Mitch eyes Honduras at 2045 UTC on 26 October 1998. The high-resolution visible shows the well-developed eye of the storm as it reaches category 5 intensity.
  • Hurricane Mitch in the big picture at 2045 UTC on 26 October 1998. This is the 6.7 micron water vapor channel, showing the hurricane's high clouds above the mid-level water vapor that obscures the planet at this wavelength.
  • Hurricane Mitch in the Caribbean at 1615 UTC on 24 October 1998. The color-tinted clouds are a result of using the thermal infrared channels.
• Tropical storm Madeline and hurricane Lester visit the southwest coast of Mexico at 1745 UTC on 17 October 1998. The color-tinted clouds are a result of using the thermal infrared channels.
• Hurricane Georges gallery
  • Georges hits the Gulf Coast at 1645 UTC on 28 September 1998. While the center of the storm passed over Mississippi, most of the damage is caused by the heavy rain and storm surge extending eastward to the Florida panhandle.
  • Georges approaches the Gulf Coast at 1545 UTC on 27 September 1998. The storm grew and strengthened during its overnight passage over the warm Gulf waters after leaving the Florida straits.
  • Georges is avoided by Ivan, Jeanne and Karl in a full-disk view at 1745 UTC on 26 September 1998. It is very unusual to have four named storms in the Atlantic at the same time.
  • Georges eyes Key West (black and white GIF) at 2045 UTC on 25 September 1998. The storm intensified and formed an eye after passing Key West, swiping the island with reinvigorated winds and rain.
  • Georges hits Key West (black and white 3.5 MByte QT movie) 25 September 1998. At dawn, the storm shows striations of many gravity waves indicating the recent violent collapse of storm towers. The hurricane picks up energy and opens an eye as the day goes on.
  • Georges hits Hispanola at 1445 UTC on 22 September 1998. A big eye formed as the storm re-intensified in the warm waters between Puerto Rico and Hispanola. The color-tinted clouds are a result of using the thermal infrared channels.
  • Georges approaches Puerto Rico at 1745 UTC on 21 September 1998. At this time, Georges had declined to a category 3 (115 mph winds), but it is expected to pass over the Greater Antilles, and possibly over southern Florida. The visible channel has been overlaid on a blue-sea, green-land map.
  • Georges in hurricane alley at 1715 UTC on 19 September 1998. At this time, the storm had reached category 4 strength (winds greater than 130 mph).
• Hurricanes Isis and Earl at 1630 UTC on 3 September 1998. Neither storm is well-formed, but both are dumping a lot of rain on land.
• Hurricane Danielle at sea at 1445 UTC on 31 August 1998. A pretty face destined to blow out to sea.
• GOES-8 wobble, at 0245 UTC on 29 August 1998. The Sounder's filter wheel slowed to a stop, slewing the entire spacecraft about one-half degree during a full-disk image, producing a wrinkle midway through South America. The Sounder's filter wheel was restarted a few hours later.
• Hurricane Bonnie
  • Old Bonnie and young Danielle at 1515 UTC on 29 August 1998.
  • Bonnie soaks North Carolina 27 August 1998. This enhanced image lays the visible clouds over a green-blue geographical map, using the infrared channel to give the low, warm clouds a yellow tinge and give the high, cold clouds a blue tinge.
  • Bonnie approaches Carolina (1.2 MByte QT movie) on 25 August 1998. Ironically, the GOES images are flawed in the middle of the day by radio interference from a National Weather Service weather balloon.
  • Bonnie lies over the ocean... in this false-color multi-spectral image overlaid on a geographical map on 24 August 1998.
• Florida Fires of 1998
  • Florida fire poster for 6 July 1998. This poster was used by the Vice-President, Al Gore, at a press conference in Florida on the subject of the ongoing fires. A full-size copy of the poster can be found on the public relations page of NASA's web site for global fire monitoring.
  • Miami heat island and Florida fires at 1715 UTC on 3 July 1998. Visible clouds overlay a simple color map, with red dots added where the 4 micron infrared channel indicates extraordinary hot spots. At noon time, the urban heat island around Miami appears as bright as the unresolved wild fires on the northeast coast.
  • Florida fires, color movie (5MB QT movie) 3 July 1998. In this sequence, visible (daytime) or infrared (nighttime) clouds overlay a simple color map, with red dots added where the 4 micron infrared channel indicates extraordinary hot spots.
  • Florida fires close I-95 on 2 July 1998. Smoke from the wild fires drifted across the coast and out to sea, closing the I-95 traffic corridor from Ft.Lauderdale to Cape Canaveral. This GOES-8 multi-spectral image was converted to natural color, and red dots were added where the 4 micron infrared channel indicated extraordinary hot spots.
• Hurricane Blas in the Pacific 24 June 1998 at 1645 UTC. The image has been colorized using the GOES-8 visible channel and two infrared channels.
• Smoke from a big fire at Titusville Florida 7 June 1998 at 1145 UTC. A multi-spectral view was converted to "natural color" Fires burned along the east coast of central and northern Florida for days, destroying several homes.
• Smoke and fires in east-central Florida 6 June 1998 at 2215 UTC. The thermal infrared hot spots observed at 4 microns are superimposed on a "natural color" multi-spectral image taken near sunset.
• Storm leaves cold dark trail across midwest 2 June 1998, 1745 UTC. A small, isolated storm moved through the area overnight, leaving the ground 5 C colder and noticeably darker than the surrounding areas. This nasty little storm went on to create destructive tornados in Pennsylvania and western Maryland later that evening.
• GOES-8 view of tornadic cloud over Nashville (0.3MB QT movie). The best image occurs a little after 2015 UTC (4:15 pm EDT) on 16 April 1998.
• Saharan dust blows across the Atlantic on 4 April 1998. The mid-morning (1775 UTC) view provides visibility in the forward scattering by the huge dust clouds that blow off the desert every year, which can be noticeable as far west as Puerto Rico.
• Tropical harbinger of the 1998 hurricane season, observed at midday on 1 April 1998 (no fooling!).
• Storms in Georgia and Florida (1.6MB QT movie) 8-9 March 1998. The El Nino driven weather caused serious flooding in Georgia and tornados in northern Florida. In this satellite loop, a color table is applied to the 11 micron thermal infrared channel, marking the highest cloud-tops as red.
• Criss-crossing clouds over Florida at 1732 UTC on 8 March 1998. On the periphery of a strong springtime front, clouds streaks and waves zip across the state.
• Killer tornados in central Florida at night (3MB QT movie) 23 February 1998. Six to ten tornados occurred just south of Orlando around local midnight (0500 UTC), killing 38 people and injuring several hundred. In this satellite loop, a color table is applied to the 11 micron thermal infrared channel, marking the highest cloud-tops as red. The tornadic clouds that spring up near the end of the time series appear to be typical spring thunderstorms from the satellite's point of view. Unfortunately, a double line-slip due to a computer glitch on the GOES-8 satellite occurs, cutting through central Florida at 0235 UTC (9:35 pm EST).
• Occidental and oriental full moons, seen 10 hours apart over the northwest shoulder of the Earth by GOES-8 and GMS-5 on 12-13 February 1998. It is luck for the weather scan schedules of the geosynchronous satellites to happen to image the same celestial event.
• Winter clouds make a nice cross-country landscape as big wet storms lash both coasts on 5 February 1998.
• January 98 from GOES-8 (12MB QT movie). Ironically, radio interference due to NWS weather balloons sometimes damages GOES reception, especially at 1145 and 2345 UTC.
• Classic north Atlantic storm on 21 January 1998. The combination of dry arctic air from Canada blowing across the Gulf Stream often spins up sprawling sub-hurricanes like this one.
• Montserrat burps (0.6 MB QT movie) twice during the day of 1 January 1998. As before, the animation is created from combinations of the infrared data, and colorized when there is an spectral signature for volcanic ash.
• December 1997 from GOES-8 (12MB QT movie), full-disk images every 3 hours as a highly compressed multi-spectral combination of the visible, 4 micron and 11 micron channels. Ironically, radio interference due to NWS weather balloons sometimes damages GOES reception at 1145 and 2345 UTC.
• Saharan sandstorm at Xmas (0.6 MB QT movie) from GOES-8 visible images taken every morning during 21-28 December 1997 show the outbreak of a great sandstorm across Senegal and Mauritania.
• Montserrat Erupts (1.4 MB QT movie), starting at 0700 UTC on 26 December 1997. The upper level winds from the northwest rapidly spread the volcanic cloud southeastward across the northern Lesser Antilles, aka the Leeward Islands, a favorite wintertime vacation area for the well-to-do from northern climes. The multi-spectral scheme colorizes clouds that are likely to be volcanic ash, using warm colors for low warm clouds and cool colors for cold, high clouds, as was done with a previous eruption. In fact, Montserrat makes ripples (0.4 MB QT movie) in the upper-air water vapor, as observed by GOES channel 3 at 6.7 microns.
• Question mark snowstorm before Xmas, 1745 UTC on 24 December 1997. This colorized multi-spectral picture from the main GOES-8 channels shows a beautiful comma-shaped storm across the central United States.
• Storms after Greenland meteor (0.5MB QT movie) 8-12 December 1997. This movie was inspired by the report of large meteor strike in Greenland on the morning of December 9, followed by the formation of a large cloud. Based on the GOES time-series, the cloud formation appears to be a normal storm development.
• November from GOES-8 (12MB QT movie), full-disk images every 3 hours as a highly compressed multi-spectral combination of the visible, 4 micron and 11 micron channels. Ironically, radio interference due to NWS weather balloons sometimes damages GOES reception at 1145 and 2345 UTC.
• Tornados hit Louisiana (1.5MB QT movie), 21 November 1997. The cities of Lafayette and Covington LA sustained significant damage and personal injury during a tornado outbreak that then proceeded through Mississippi and Georgia, tearing up rural habitations.
• Hurricane Rick hits Mexico at 1745 UTC on 9 November 1997. Visible and infrared channels were use to make the false-color image.
• Contrails in the "split window", 11 minus 12 microns infrared, on 9 November 1997. The ability to do this in the far infrared means that the channels could be used at night to see contrails, too. It is surprising the resolve the contrails from the GOES Imager at 4 km resolution.
• October from GOES-8 (8MB QT movie) October 1997. The pictures are highly JPEG compressed to make downloads more practical, although resolution and color then suffer.
• Montserrat Erupts! (0.5 MB QT movie) 6 November 1997. The two main images are available as a mosaic on a page. The multi-spectral scheme colorizes clouds that are likely to be volcanic ash, using warm colors for low warm clouds and cool colors for cold, high clouds, as was done with a previous eruption. This outburst produced a peculiarly hooked clouds without a silicate ash signature, perhaps water.
• After the Midwest blizzard GOES-8 visible image at 1815 UTC on 27 October 1997. The picture captures the sweep of an autumnal blizzard that left the Rocky Mountains fairly dry while dumping a foot of snow across eastern Colorado, Nebraska and points east, stranding hundreds of weekend travelers.
• New England in autumn 1545 UTC, 11 October 1997. The strong ENSO episode creates weeks of sparkling weather in the northeastern USA and Canada, revealing the post-glacial landscape of lakes and rivers.
• Chicago landmarks (1 MB QT movie), GOES-8 visible images of the Chicago area for 3 hours on the clear, bright morning of 29 September 1997 reveal several landmarks of human activity which are clearly visible from frame-to-frame, but which are hard to identify with well-known parts of the city. The vertical dark strip may be local route 50, fading away at a white patch which may be Midway airport. The other white dots may be old limestone quarries.
• 6 days of Hurricane Nora (3 MB QT movie) 21-27 September 1997. This false-color movie of the GOES-8 full-disk images every 3 hours show how that hurricane crawls up the Baja coast and is then whisked across Arizona.
• Hurricane Nora in the Gulf of California, where GOES-8 sees a moisture-laden storm at 1545 UTC, 25 September 1997. The storm goes on to flood Arizona.
• Contrails extend almost to the limb of the GOES-8 view of the Pacific Ocean to the west of California on 19 September 1997. The extent of man-made cirrus is one of the currently "hot" questions in atmospheric science.
• July from GOES-8 (13MB QT movie), composed from false-color multi-spectral frames taken every 3 hours during the month (as best we could).
• San Bernedino fire movie, observed in the visible channel on 13 September 1997.
• Hurricane Erika at sea, at 1745 UTC on 7 September 1997. This infrared image in the water vapor band shows a giant jet stream (dark meandering streak) protectively encircling the southern and eastern United States, promising to carry the storm to the north central Atlantic.
• Thunderstorms break 105 F heat wave in Washington DC 17 August 1997, just 1 degree F shy of tying the all-time high set in 1936.
• Montserrat Erupts! (3 MB QT movie) and Montserrat Erupts! (mosaic) 5-8 August 1997. The movie and the mosaic employ a multi-spectral scheme that "turns on" colorizing for suspected volcanic clouds, coloring the low clouds warm colors (red and yellow) and coloring the high cloud cool colors (green and blue). Each eruption of Montserrat injects a vertical plume that often shears into two pieces: the low-level winds from the east carrying the warm clouds to the west, and the upper-level winds from the west carrying the cool clouds to the east.
  Montserrat Erupts revisited (13 MB QT movie) is an improved version version of the 3-day movie, with higher contrast and fewer "false alarms" in a simple split-window colorization scheme. Recent high-topped thunderstorms also have the same spectral signature in the 11-12 micron split-window as the silicate ash clouds. Fortunately, it is easy to see the difference (in temperature and location, if nothing else). Further discussion of the colorization technique.
• Thunderstorms break east coast heat wave 28 July 1997. Temperatures in Washington DC dropped from 100F to 72F in an hour as the storms zipped through.
• Pacific Cascades in summer 1745 UTC, 19 July 1997. GOES-8 captures the entire chain of snow-capped volcanoes from California to British Columbia. It is easy to guess which one is the remains of Mt. Saint Helens. How many others can you name?
• Hudson's Bay to the Northwest Passage 1745 UTC, 19 July 1997. A clear summer day reveals the vastness of the Canadian archipelago to above the arctic circle.
• Hurricane Danny
  • Hurricane Danny spawns tornados in Norfolk VA (2 MByte QT movie) 24 July 1997. One whirlwind went from a waterspout to an on-shore tornado in the city.
  • Hurricane Danny dumps on Alabama 1933 UTC, 21 July 1997, after it deposited a few feet of rain over the weekend. This color picture is a multi-spectral image from GOES-8's visible, 4 micron and 11 micron bands.
  • Hurricane Danny churns the Gulf states 19 July 1997, 1945 UTC. The storm appears tightly isolated to the central Gulf coast, but an arm of thunderstorms sweep the entire state of Florida.
  • Hurricane Danny opens his eye (2 MByte QT movie) 18 July 1997.
  • Tropical storm Danny surges off-shore 2330 UTC, 17 July 1997. The storm spun up and formed an eye just at it came to shore at New Orleans.
• Time-series of thunderstorm outflow boundary waves in Delaware Bay (mosaic) 16 July 1997. The QT movie version of the Delaware Bay area is more explicit. The following explanation is provided by Jim Purdom, CIRA:

  I don't believe what is being shown is an outflow boundary in the classic sense: a density current due to rain-cooled air that moves out from a thunderstorm and because of the convergence along its leading edge produces a band of clouds. Rather, what I believe we are seeing in this case is a group of dispersive waves that were initiated as a result of thunderstorm outflow perturbing stable air to its south. These dispersive waves, are not reflective of mass transport (density current), but are rather pressure perturbations that radiate away from their source. The wave phenomena can result in a slight pressure rise and temporary wind shift at the surface, but changes in temperature and dew-point are not evident. This type phenomena is fairly common for situations when outflow perturbs stable air, and is sometimes seen in early morning visible imagery in the vicinity of an MCS. A similar phenomena has been called a "morning glory" by the Australians, and is a cloud line that moves on shore from the Gulf of Carpenteria.

• Hail smashes EROS data center 13 July 1997.
• Hurricane Bill rumbles in mid-Atlantic 11 July 1997, 2245 UTC.
• Hurricane Dolores wanes in the mid-Pacific 11 July 1997, 1745 UTC.
• "Fairy ring" of thunderstorms in Pennsylvania 1932 UTC, 9 July 1997. These were part of a big front bearing down all the east coast cites from Boston to Washington, DC, snarling air traffic to the midwest.
• June from GOES-8. This 13MB QuickTime movie was assembled from the full-disk images taken once every 3 hours, using a simple multi-spectral combination (visible=red, 11 micron=green, 4 micron=blue). The movie shows the regular pulse of thunderstorms in the summertime northern hemisphere, the growing storminess in the northern subtropics as the hurricane season approaches, and strong winds across the wintery southern hemisphere. There are a number of frames with bad interference from local weather balloons.
• Colorful Gulf Coast 1845 UTC on 4 July 1997. This multi-spectral composite of the visible, 4 micron and 11 micron channels reveals differences among the reflective and thermal surfaces, particularly in the coastal regions and great river valleys.
• Storms slash New England 3 July 1997. Tornadoes occurred in western Massachusetts.
• Storms slash Michigan 2 July 1997. A classic summer front boils up and blasts tornadoes across Detroit.
• Spain, Gibraltar and the Mediterranean at 1800 UTC on 28 June 1997. Summertime has cleared visibility all the way to Algeria and the Rivera.
• USA thunderstorms at full resolution (5 MB image) at 1745 UTC on 25 June 1997. You should enjoy panning around in this crisp visible image of the entire USA east of the Rockies, as the country suffers midsummer hazy, hot and humid conditions surrounded by awesome walls of thunderstorms. Jet travel was suspended from Chicago, Detroit and Florida at this time.
• The Amazon River in the clouds 21 June 1997. Even though you cannot see the river and its tributaries, the cooler the water suppress cumulus clouds over millions of square miles at midday (1800 UTC).
• Storms skitter by Washington DC 18 June 1997. Copious lightning strikes in the near-tornadic storms north of the city also knocked GOES WEFAX offline overnight.
• Sun dogs in the clouds at 0845 UTC on 8 June 1997. These morning clouds off the coast of North Africa have albedos that go off-scale in the GOES visible (more than 150%), probably due to ice crystals reflecting sunlight very efficiently several degrees from the normal sun glint on the ocean.
• Killer tornado in Jarrell, Texas, on 27 May 1997 - the last GOES visible image of the day shows the aftermath.

  The tornado killed 27, destroyed 50 homes, buckled asphalt roads, peeled bark off trees, and stripped the flesh from the skulls of cattle tapped in its path. Some cars in the path of the tornado were never found.

  The movies (below) show the explosive development of powerful storms from an innocuous-looking front. Unfortunately, on this day, GOES-8 was not operating in a rapid-scan mode.
  CNN promptly posted a story about the Jarrell tornado using some of these GOES movies.
  At NASA:
  • QuickTime movies:
    • Greyscale visible (5 MBytes).
    • Colorized infrared (3 MBytes).
  • MPEG movies:
    • Greyscale visible (4 MBytes).
    • Colorized infrared (1.3 MBytes).
  
  At NOAA:
  • NESDIS posted an Imager analysis.
  • The University of Wisconsin posted a Sounder analysis.
  • NESDIS posted a Sounder analysis
  • Colorado State posted a meteorological satellite analysis.
  
  Even Johns Hopkins got into the act with a multi-channel composite color image for the AVHRR instrument on the NOAA polar orbiter.
• Thunderstorms chase Toto across Kansas 17 May 1997. It takes very few storms to "dog" half the state.
• Contrails burn holes in cirrus over Georgia on 10 May 1997. This is an oddity because aircraft contrails commonly trigger cloud-ice particle formation, making more cirrus, not less.
• Popocatepetl - belching volcano movie 24 April 1997, 1700--2300 UTC. A small gas-and-ash cloud is belched up in 15 minutes at local noon, and wafted away from Mexico City by upper level winds. The ash cloud can be followed out into the Gulf of Mexico by sunset in these enhanced visible images.
  CNN has some QuickTime on-site footage from another belch on April 29th.
• GOES-9 noise blip mistaken as Bay area "UFO" - in the visible image of the San Francisco sector at 1530 UTC, 16 April 1997. It is really just a corrupted data block. Scanlines are assembled from many small packets sent down from GOES. Once in a while, a packet is corrupted or lost, resulting in a break in the scanline. This is one of them. The rumor of a UFO sighting brought several thousand web hits to the Navy's web server for satellite pictures at Monterey, CA, who supplied this picture.
• Spring snow belt across a colorized Midwest at 1745 UTC on 13 April 1997. This multi-spectral image shows just how sharp the GOES-8 Imager is, as snow melt floods the rivers in Minnesota, the Dakotas, and points south.
• The space-dark African sea west of Dakar, 2-5 April 1997. This series of visible images was taken on each of 4 successive mornings at 0845 UTC, shortly after dawn at Dakar (the little peninsular barb) on the west coast of the Sahara. The ocean becomes almost as dark as outer space on the last two days, apparently because it is becalmed and it directly reflects outer space like a mirror, instead of scattering sunlight from the normally wind-roughened sea surface.
• Icebergs pouring out of the St. Lawrence on 28 March 1997.
  The ice flow for the day was animated as a Quicktime movie.
• Rosy sunrise on a winter day 1245 UTC on 7 March 1997. One of the last great winter arctic air-masses covers the eastern United States, and the warming lakes and rivers stand out in thermal contrast to the cold land as the sun approaches from the east.
• On a clear day, you can see Greenland 25 February 1997, 1815 UTC. A cold air outbreak clears the air from Cape Code to Greenland, and makes large scale cloud doilies in the North Atlantic.
• Great Lakes ice floe movie, 13 February 1997. Strong low-level winds from the east push ice in the opposite direction from usual, opening dramatic cracks across Lake Erie, for example.
• Winter fire dance movie, afternoon of 22 January 1997. Dozens of brush fires are very apparent as hot black dots in the southeastern United States when observed by the 3.9 infrared channel on GOES-8. If you look closely, you can also see smoke blowing to the west from two fires in central Florida, despite the limited 4 km horizontal resolution.
• Florida on fire 21 January 1997 at 1902 UTC. The GOES infrared 4 micron channel is very sensitive to heat at the warm end of the spectrum, so it is very good for detecting unresolved hot spots on the ground, such as the many fires that burn every day in the southeast USA.
• Montserrat erupts in multi-spectral movie 21 January 1997. The 3.9 micron infrared channel is used to key-in red at the hottest places in the scene, such as the Souferre Hills on the southern half of the island, as they heat up and release a smokey plume into the prevailing easterly winds. Pilots reported smokey encounters and sulfurous odors in the Caribbean.
• Lake-effect snow 18 January 1997, 1730 UTC. At full resolution in the visible channel, the results of a week of lake-effect snow is quite apparent in the bitterly cold upper midwest.
• CONUS in winter 18 January 1997, 1730 UTC. After a week of brutal cold in the upper midwest, the arctic air spreads out across the continent, including Florida.
• Montserrat erupts again during the day on 9 January 1997. This picture is a composite of the visible channel and the infrared 4 micron channel, used to highlight the hot spot on the island in red.
• Montserrat erupts again during the day on 8 January 1997. This movie is a multi-spectral composite of the infrared 4 micron channel, used to highlight the hot spot on the island in red, and the difference in temperature between the 11 and 12 micron split window channels, used to highlight ash clouds in blue. The close difference between the 11 and 12 micron channels is contrast-enhanced, also contrast-enhancing the detector-to-detector relative calibration errors that stripe the image.
• Montserrat erupts again overnight on 19-20 December 1996. This movie is the difference between the the brightness temperature in the two long-wave thermal bands at 11 and 12 microns, where wet clouds and silicate ash show up darker due to more absorption and less emission at the longer wavelength. The cloud expelled from the volcano is swirled around between the prevailing low-level easterly winds and the high-level westerlies. If you look closely, a dense knot blows from tiny Montserrat to the larger island to the southeast, Guadelupe.
  Montserrat has erupted twice before in 1996, in September and in April.
• Tornado east of Tampa FL on 7 December 1996 hits trailer park, killing one and injuring twelve just after 3 pm EST (2215 UTC). North of this area, Orlando received a record 1.3 inches of rainfall, the source of which can be seen as a large mushroom cloud earlier in the day in this movie. Despite the obviously dangerous front, GOES-8 was not operating in rapid scan mode over Florida.
• Midwest snow-track at 1745 UTC on 1 December 1996. A series of ice and snow storms moved across the midwest during Thanksgiving week, leaving a clear trail from New Mexico to Illinois. Dozens of people were killed and thousands were stranded or without power. Notice how narrow a winter storm track really is, making its path difficult to forecast.
• Winter geography test (4 MBytes) 1745 UTC on 27 November 1996. This large full-resolution image of the United States east of the Rockies makes a good test of your knowledge of geography and a handsome example of every type of cloud cloud cover.
• Hurricane Marco south of Cuba 1745 UTC on 20 November 1996 -- full-disk false-color picture while it was briefly at 75 mph winds.
• Shuttle launch captured in color at 1955 UTC on 19 November 1996. In this false-color composite, the shuttle engines are off-scale in the 4 micron infrared channel used for the blue ocean, so we re-colored those pixels red instead of black. The visible channel provides the detailed contrail of the solid engines and the Florida landmarks.
• After Lake-effect snows in the Midwest, 1745 UTC on 15 November 1996. More than a meter of snow collected along Lake Erie, from Cleveland to Buffalo.
• Visible moon-set behind the Pacific northwest at 2345 UTC on 4 November 1996. The moon at 3/4 waning is quite dark in the visible, but off-scale in the infrared, with a warm halo about it due to the scattered light in the GOES-8 infrared Imager.
• Hurricane Lili
  • Hurricane Lili over Cuba at 1745 UTC on 18 October 1996. The storm dumped a lot of rain right at the end of the growing season.
  • Hurricane Lili south of Cuba at 1745 UTC on 17 October 1996.
• Hurricane Josephine
  • Hurricane Josephine in the Gulf 1415 UTC, 7 October 1996. This storm is diffusely organized, with low winds and rain at the center and high winds and rain in the surrounding rain bands along the coast, to the north and east.
• Good morning, Midwest! 1445 UTC, 29 September 1996. On a clear day, you can see the bio-geology of the midwestern USA from GOES-8 in "natural" color.
• Hurricane Isidore
  • Hurricane Isidore is born 1715 UTC on 27 September 1997. The storm is a long way from land in the western hemisphere, having just spun up just off the coast of Africa.
• Rainy day along the Gulf coast 27 September 1996 (2 MByte movie). The constant inflow of moist Gulf air at low level underneath a vigorous cold front produced a constant downpour at the Texas-Louisiana border.
• Volcanic eruption in the Soufrierre Hill on Montserrat Island in the Lesser Antilles, 0015 UTC on 18 September 1996. This image is the short-wave thermal channel at 3.9 microns, which is very sensitive to unresolved hot spots like fires and volcanos. In this case, the nighttime volcano is consistent with a 500 K hot spot over an area of only 250 square meters within the 4 km footprint of GOES. There is no thermal signature in the 11 and 12 micron channels, which is consistent with a small hot spot instead of a large warm spot. Montserrat has erupted before.
• Hurricane Hortense
  • Hurricane Hortense and Fausto eye each other across the USA at 1815 UTC on 12 September 1996. This multi-spectral color image was created from GOES-8's visible (red), long-wave thermal (green), and short-wave thermal (blue) channels, so that low clouds appear red, middle clouds appear yellow-orange, and high clouds appear white. Hortense was no problem for the United States, but Fausto blundered across the country, finally ending up as a "northeaster" over New England for a few days, causing the worst flooding in Boston's recent history.
  • Hurricane Hortense "eyes" Florida 2115 UTC on 12 September 1996.
  • Hurricane Hortense north of Hispaniola at 1745 UTC on 11 September 1996. The visible and thermal channels have been combined to make the land appear green, the ocean appear blue, the low rain clouds appear yellow, and the high cirrus clouds appear pastel-blue.
  • Hurricane Hortense in the hurricane alley at sunset on 9 September 1996.
• Hurricane Fran
  • A perspective view used by TIME Magazine. We made a movie flyby of this perspective view.
  • How to spiff up a hurricane using a plain visible image from 4 September 1996. To bring out the shadows in the cloud-tops, do a local contrast-enhance, and then do a general brightening and a contrast-stretch on the mid-level greys. Someday, you will see this on TV, instead of the flat, unenhanced images.
  • Mark Thomas' collection of Fran images, including a GIF movie.
  • Hurricane Fran in Virginia 1315 UTC on 6 September 1996. The storm laid down heavy rain all through mid-Atlantic Appalachian Mountains. The multi-spectral color version distinguishes the low, wet rain clouds from the high, dry cirrus outflow.
  • Hurricane Fran approaches the Carolinas at 1415 UTC on 5 September 1996. A low over Florida and a high over the mid-Atlantic states are conspiring to blow her ashore.
  • Hurricane Fran colorized at 1715 UTC on 4 September 1996. The storm stands in contrast to the fine weather about to be disrupted over the eastern United States. The visible and thermal channels have been combined to make the land appear green, the ocean appear blue, and the clouds appear white or pastel.
  • Hurricane Fran threatens the Bahamas and Florida at 2015 UTC on 3 September 1996.
• Hurricane Edouard
  • Hurricane Edouard approaches New England 1715 UTC, 1 September 1996. This 4 km resolution visible image includes the eastern United States and Hurricane Fran in the Sargasso Sea.
  • Hurricane Edouard with a great eye in mid-Atlantic 25 August 1994 at 1245 UTC. The storm has intensified to a category 4 hurricane, with winds of 140 mph.
  • Hurricane Edouard and sun-glint in mid-Atlantic 24 August 1996 at 1315 UTC. At this time the sun is extremely bright reflecting off the becalmed seas northeast on South America, while the hurricane has a very well-developed eye.
  • Hurricane Edouard movie in mid-Atlantic (3 MByte MPEG) 24 August 1996. The movie illustrates and the large-scale flow of the atmosphere in hurricane alley while Edouard churns the deserted ocean.
• Hurricane Dolly
  • Hurricane Dolly in northeast Mexico 2032 UTC, 23 August 1996, bring much-needed rainfall to the drought-stricken area and the Rio Grande valley.
  • Hurricane Dolly started crossing Yucatan on 20 August 1996 at 2145 UTC. The storm is barely organized and drifting slowly to the northwest.
• Down-bursts hammer the Potomac 4:30 pm EDT on 16 August 1996. The cloud just northeast of the District of Columbia brought an inch of hail and downed hundreds of trees in the Bowie MD area during rush hour.
• Tornadic super-cell 10 miles southeast of Denver airport at 4 pm MDT, 9 August 1996. The passengers in the airport were treated to a tornado warning on the public address system, and they were assured that they would be instructed to go to a safe place if a tornado struck the airport. Imagine the damage that would occur!
• Hurricane César
  • Hurricane César crossing mountainous western Nicaragua in the morning, 1245 UTC 28 July 1996. Technically, it weakened to a tropical storm (winds below 75 mph) over night, and it will be renamed if it carries into the Pacific, as hurricane Joan did in 1988. The vigorous thunderstorms forming over the Guatemala Basin in front of César promise more action.
  • Hurricane César gets organized east of Nicaragua at 2045 UTC on 27 July 1996, in this full-earth image.
• Tornadic storms in Baltimore-Washington region, 19 July 1996.
  • WEATHERNET4 in Washington, DC put together some ground-based views:
    • Picture from a videotape made in Baltimore near I-895 looking north
    • Story written by the new MSNBC (Microsoft-NBC) service
    • Map of the National Weather Service's analysis of several tornado locations
  • The GOES Project Scientist at NASA-GSFC put together some satellite views:
    • GOES-8 movie of the Baltimore-Washington region (5 MByte MPEG) during the afternoon's frontal passage.
    • Tornadic cloud west of Baltimore MD at 1932 UTC. Many homes were severely damaged or destroyed in the region between Harper's Ferry WV and Baltimore MD.
    • Thunderstorm explodes in upper Potomac and Fairfax VA at 2025 UTC. Residents and workers in the area took shelter in basements as some emergency sirens were sounded. The citizens were nervous after the tornado that occurred the month before in Fairfax VA. Tornados are normally very rare around the nation's capitol.
    • Thunderstorms hammer Washington, DC at 2045 UTC, 19 July 1996. The storm spawned near-tornadoes north in Fairfax VA, flooded highways, and snarled rush-hour Beltway traffic.
    • Map of the Baltimore area, showing the location of Gamber, the town worst hit by the tornado.
    (The best factual web page about tornadoes was set up for the movie Twister.)
• Hurricane Bertha
  • Bertha soaks New England (4 MByte movie) 13 July 1996. The storm moves smartly up the coast from Delaware to Massachusetts in 12 hours, about as fast as the interstate lets you drive.
  • Bertha over Long Island in the afternoon 1945 UTC, 13 July 1996. Note the line of heavy thunderstorms all across eastern Massachusetts, in advance of the center of the storm.
  • Bertha enters New Jersey in the morning 1145 UTC, 13 July 1996. The eye of the storms is still over the DelMarVa peninsula (DELaware-MARyland-VirginiA), but the storm is dominated by sweep of low-level oceanic moisture onto the Jersey coast, where it turns into thunderstorms.
  • Bertha astride North Carolina in the evening, 2245 UTC, 12 July 1996. With the open eye and the low sun angle, individual thunderstorms stand out very clearly.
  • Bertha comes ashore (6 MByte, 70 frame movie), 12 July 1996. The open eye has a dense low cloud deck beneath it, letting you see the shadows of the higher clouds even at midday.
  • Bertha approaches the Carolinas 1445 UTC, 12 July 1996. This enhanced picture shows the hurricane on a continental scale in the morning.
  • Bertha cruises by Hispaniola 9 July 1996, 1215 UTC. This early morning image captures the giant thunderstorms that explode periodically just northwest of the eye of a hurricane, where wind speeds are maximized by the combination of rotation and westward motion.
  • Bertha spins up in hurricane alley on 7 July 1996. Note the sun glint along the northern coast of South America, reflecting strongly off the calm coastal waters, especially at noon around Margarita Island, Venezuela.
  • The birth of tropical storm Bertha 1845 UTC, 5 July 1996. This is a 1/4 resolution visible image of the storm developing in "hurricane alley" between Africa and South America.
• GOES-8 image as a tornado hits Fairfax VA, west of Washington, DC on 24 June 1996. This full-resolution image has been enhanced to bring out the convective clouds beneath the cirrus. Media coverage of the tornado showed damaged homes in Fairfax, torrential rains, downed trees and a paralyzed rush hour. (The best factual web page about tornadoes was set up for the movie Twister.)
  • MPEG movie of the GOES full resolution images for the Chesapeake area on 24 June 1996. Power surges crashed the GOES ingestor at NASA-GSFC in Greenbelt MD, as the storm rolled through, causing us to miss one hour of the most interesting frames in the movie.
• Dark-side of the Earth under the midnight Sun 22 June 1996 at 0545 UTC (12:45 am, GOES-8 local time). Because of light scattering, the northwest limb of the Earth is visible an hour past sunset and far south of the arctic circle, the geometrical limit of solar illumination. You can see storm clouds in the dawn glare of the northeast crescent, near Greenland.
• GOES-8 captures the Shuttle launch plume and rocket heat 21 June 1996, a little after 1445 UTC (10:45 am EDT). Visible plumes have been seen before by GOES, but this is the first time the unresolved heat from the rocket has been seen in the 4 and 8 km infrared pixels. These pixels are over-sampled 7:4 in the east-west direction, so at least 2 pixels are turned on in each IR image. The hot spots are not consistent with an unresolved blackbody, being extra-bright in the water vapor bands at 6.7 and 12 microns (channels 3 and 5). The window channels at 3.9 and 11 microns are consistent with a 493K blackbody occupying 0.42% of a 2 km square pixel. The water vapor channels are consistent with a 581K blackbody occupying 0.55% of a 2 km pixel. The Shuttle burns liquid hydrogen and oxygen to create a hot exhaust that is more opaque in the water vapor channels than the window channels.
• Tropical storm Arthur buzzes the Carolina coast on 19 June 1996. The first named storm of the hurricane season can't find enough energy in the Gulf Stream to make real trouble, leaving it to the front across northern Virginia to do the real flood damage.
• Summer thunderstorms in the mountain west (13 MB MPEG movie) from dawn to dusk on 14 June 1996. This is a full resolution video covering from Idaho to Mexico, Utah to Oklahoma. There are 75 frames, 750x1000 pixels, mostly at 5 minute intervals, as the atmosphere evolves from a pleasant morning to a wild evening in the high plains.
• Summer thunderstorms in the mid-Atlantic states 9 June 1996. This image has been digitally processed to sharpen the shadows, but the map-dots then speckle the picture like bullet holes.
• GOES-8 rapid scans of Kansas thunderstorms on the afternoon of 31 May 1996. A tornado occurred near Sheridan Lake in eastern Colorado, just across the middle of the western border of Kansas (just below the "w" in "Midwest" in the title frame).
• GOES-8 routine scans of Wisconsin thunderstorms on 19 May 1996. The images have been automatically sharpened and brightened to bring out cloudtop details.
• GOES-8 rapid scans of Missouri thunderstorms on the afternoon of 9 May 1996.
  • There also is a QuickTime version, augmented with sound effects. Ironically, these rapid scans by GOES-8 were performed merely to capture data for a training session, not to watch for tornados.
• The Azores at dawn (at 0845 UTC on 7 May 96) make an striking greyscale study in marine cloudiness, sun-glint, and becalmed gyres downwind of the islands west of the bulge of north Africa. The Dakar peninsula an dark inland areas of exposed rock sticking up out of the dust and sand are quite clear, as are the great rivers of Gambia, et al., further south. We saw something like this in May last year, too.
• "Train" (simile to railroad) of thunderstorms across Missouri on 28 April 1996. A west wind triggers a series of thunderstorms that start at the Kansas border and grow across Missouri, dropping inch-after-inch of rain along the same path, flooding the occupants.
• Brush fire threatens Los Alamos, NM beginning on 26 April 1996. There is concern for the nuclear facility, since the fires are expected to burn out-of-control for a week due to drought conditions in the southwest.
• Tornadic storm approaches Indianapolis at sunset on 19 April 1996. After dark, several damaging tornados hit the Indianapolis area, and a large number of tornados broke out in central Illinois.
  • Watch a movie of the approaching storm during the afternoon.
• Rapid-scan during thunderstorms along the Red River (8 MByte MPEG) on 12 April 1996. GOES-8 was used in NOAA's operational rapid-scan mode, taking six to nine 1-minute interval images in between larger-area scans, so that the time-lapse movie has skips and jumps. (Rapid scans do not have to be irregular, but that how NESDIS wants it.) If you want better animation performance, fetch the QuickTime version (11 Mbytes).
• Volcanic eruption at Montserrat "filmed" by GOES-8 in half-hourly images on the afternoon of 3 April 1996 (also available as a poster). An ash cloud from the Soufriere Hills is injected into the southwesterly upper air winds after 1915 UTC, moving about 40 km/hr at right angles to the prevailing southeasterly low-level winds, and passing over the neighboring island of Antigua. The volcano was watched closely by volcanologists before the eruption. For a tour of the island, check out the Montserrat tourist bureau.
• Spring storm development in the Midwest (6 MByte movie) 18-20 March 1996. Simple RGB false color using the visible channel in the red gun makes low clouds look red in the daytime. Note the outbreak of nasty little groups of thunderstorms along the East Coast at the end of the sequence. Although March is severe weather month for the Midwest, GOES-8 is not being used in rapid scan mode, not even during tornado watches.
• Line jitter in the Sierra Madre 2 March 1996. There are GOES scanlines that regularly jitter back-and-forth east-west by one pixel between frames (4 km in the infrared windows). One jitter occurs regularly near 28N latitude, noticeable in the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains of northwestern Mexico, just east of the Gulf of California. This movie is a magnified image pair of infrared channel 4, taken 17 minutes apart (0715 and 0732 UTC). Look for the shearing halfway down the right hand side of the image, in the valleys east of the Gulf. The jitter is thought to be a ground-processing software error.
• Brush fires in Oklahoma on 23 February 1996. The 4 micron bandpass, called channel 2 (or IR2) is very sensitive to surface temperature differences and captures the brush fires as several day spots in the afternoon. The University of Oklahoma posted a related news story.
• Shuttle launch plume on 22 February 1996. The separation of the solid rockets is not apparent this time, the way it was with a similar episode with GOES-9 on 12 November 1995.
• Sun-glint marches across Brazil on 22 February 1996. Andy Negri at NASA-GSFC noticed the glitter from the rivers of southern Amazon basin while he was studying convective clouds and rainfall.
• Movie showing the day after the mid-Atlantic blizzard on 18 February 1996. This storm dropped 8 to 12 inches of snow in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, when less than 4 inches were forecast the day before. The snow melt in Virginia is noticeable, as are the spacecraft motions. The movie is at 2 km resolution, 38 frames during the daylight hours, with 600x500 pixels per frame. There is a 1 km resolution version of the movie, too, a 4 MByte download with 1200x1000 pixels per frame.
• Data compression and enhancement test over Florida at dawn 27 January 1996. Lossy JPEG schemes make enhancements ugly, unless you do the enhancement first.
• Cloud-threatened Mid-Atlantic states 13 January 1996, 1445 UTC. The GOES-8 visible channel shows winter clouds piled up on the western side of the Appalachians and spilling across, eager to add to the 2 to 3 feet of snow which fell in the past 5 days along the East Coast of the US.
• Post-blizzard view of the Mid-Atlantic states 11 January 1996, 1435 UTC. This enhanced visible image shows a wealth of features in addition to the heavy snow fields in the Appalachians, such as cracks in the just-forming ice in Lake Erie along the Ohio coastline and a plethora of contrails lacing the cirrus clouds over the southern states.
• QuickTime movie (1.3 MBytes) of the globe during 2 cold days in the USA, 10-12 December 1995. The synoptic full-earth images taken every three hours were color-composited (Red = 0.6 micron VIS, Green = 11 micron IR, Blue = 3.9 micron IR). The arctic air makes the USA look as cold as a mid-level cloud, while the southern hemisphere enjoys the sun.
• Volcanic plume from Cerro Negro in Nicaragua, 1 December 1995, 1715 UTC. The volcano is just northwest of the tip of Lake Managua (12.5N, 86.7W). In the GOES image, the volcano was hours past its first eruption, leaving a dense low-level volcanic plume blowing out on the prevailing easterlies into the Guatemala Basin.
  • For ground-based information about Cerro Negro, checkout the Volcanoes of Nicaragua page
  • The effects of volcanoes on climate.
  • There are ground-based pictures of the plume.
  • Some noisy CNN footage of the nighttime eruption as a QuickTime movie (960 kBytes).
• Hurricane Tanya
  • Hurricane Tanya in mid-Atlantic at midday on 11 October 1995. Tanya kept well off-shore, and never threatened land.
• Shear madness at the African limb, where GOES-8 makes a different shear pattern each day during the full-earth scans at 0845 UTC, for October 20-25. Some days, there is no problem at all. The problem does not seem to be in the spacecraft -- ground-processing software of the east-/west-going scans is suspected.
• African dust storm seeds the Atlantic. The morning sun at 0845 UTC on 22 October 95 reveals dust so thick that you cannot even see the ocean over an area the size of Texas.
• Hurricane Roxanne
  • Multi-spectral image of Hurricane Roxanne over Yucatan on October 11. The corresponding visible image shows that the United States are enjoying and extraordinarily clear day.
• Hurricane Opal
  • Crudely colorized movie of Hurricane Opal (7 MBytes) during the 2 days it moved from the middle of the Gulf of Mexico to the middle of the eastern seaboard. GOES-EAST is turned off in the middle of the night when the spacecraft passes through the Earth's shadow.
  • Manually colorized picture of Hurricane Opal at the Gulf Coast 4 October 95, 1945 UTC. The image has been processed to make the land appear green, the oceans blue and the clouds white, using only one visible channel and two thermal infrared bands.
  • GOES-8 visible image of Hurricane Opal at the Gulf Coast 4 October 1995, 2255 UTC, just south of Mobile, Alabama. A very intense thunderstorm has just erupted at the center of the hurricane.
• Realtime multispectal images of CONUS (CONterminous Unites States, in NOAA-speak). These are JPEG compressed color images derived from the higher resolution TIFF images, simply setting red=visible, green=ir4 and blue=ir2 (both inverse brightness to make cold cloud-tops appear bright). This combination make cold high clouds look bright blue-green or white, and low clouds look red (during the day, when they can be seen in the visible). The rarer cool mid-level clouds look yellow over the United States, as do the cold low clouds over northern Canada.
• Upper-level low spins over the Sargasso Sea on 23 September 1995. The counter-clockwise circulation at high levels shears off the tops of thunderstorms growing out of the lower clouds. Using a multi-spectral combination of the window channels marks the low clouds with a reddish tinge during the day. This sort of sequence should provided upper-level winds over data-void regions and result in improved weather forecasts.
• Hurricane Luis
  • Large left/right dither-stereo 2-frame mpeg-movie of the eye of Hurricane Luis from GOES-8/9, at 1621 UTC on 6 September 1995. Using Netscape 2, you can view a quarter-sized GIF version of the animation.
  • Red/Green 3-D stereo picture of the eye of Hurricane Luis from GOES-8/9, at 1621 UTC on 6 September 1995. Put the red lens of your 3-D glasses over your right eye, representing GOES-8, and the blue-green lens over your left eye, representing GOES-9. That puts your eyeballs about 6,000 miles apart and 22,500 miles up (about 15 degrees angular convergence, the stereoscopic equivalent to having it a foot in front of your two eyes).
  • Hurricane Luis in red-green stereo and in dither stereo viewing from GOES-8/9 simultaneously at 2041 UTC on 5 September 1995. GOES-9 visible sensitivity is than GOES-8's, and it is viewing the back sides of the late afternoon clouds more directly, making GOES-9's scene brighter than GOES-8's.
  • Colorized picture of Hurricane Luis in mid-Atlantic.
  • Hurricane Luis eyes the Chesapeake Bay region on the morning of 9 September 1995.
• Unsaturated IR moon-shots of the crescent moon northeast of the Earth at 0845 UTC on July 2, 1995. (These are high-precision TIFF images -- make sure that your TIFF reader handles 16-bit integers and floating point values.)
• Fire! (north of Lake Superior), time-lapse multi-spectral images on 15 August 1995.
• March of the Atlantic storms on 25 August 1995. Hurricane Felix is in mid-north Atlantic, tropical storm Jerry is raining on Florida, and hurricanes Iris and Humberto are in mid-south Atlantic, along a string of tropical depressions.
• Moon eclipsed by the Earth on 12 August 1995. From the GOES-8 viewpoint, the moon is being covered by the Earth with equatorial South Pacific thunderstorms in the foreground. The unenhanced panel shows you how dark the moon really is. The enhanced panel shows image refraction by the thin layer of atmosphere at the western limb. The far western edge of the moon is cut off by the edge-of-scan frame. The moon appears to be segmented because of the scan mechanism on GOES-8.
• Cape Verde mystery storm. At 0845 UTC, 19 August 1995 we find a small, tightly spiraled storm wound up within the Cape Verde islands off the coast of North Africa. At 15N, there is not enough coriolis force to make a storm spin very much. So, how did it get that way? "The answer is blowin' in the wind."
• Hurricane Felix
  • Hurricane Felix departs on Friday, 18 August 1995, as the sun sets over a lucky shoreline.
  • Hurricane Felix off Cape Hatteras was watched by GOES-9 on Thursday, 17 August 1995
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Wednesday, August 16, 1995 at 2000 UTC, 2 km resolution. Show the nice clear day that the eastern seaboard enjoys due to subsidence from the upper-level outflow from the storm.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Wednesday, August 16, 1995 at 2000 UTC, 1 km resolution. The east coast is having a nice day.
  • The Moon looks at hurricane Felix on Monday, August 14, 1995, 2045 UTC. This is a particularly garish multi-spectral combination of channels 1, 3 and 4.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Monday, full earth view, August 14, 1995, 1445 UTC. An unusual "rooster tail" of cirrus clouds extends all the way to South America.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Monday, 2 km resolution, August 14, 1995, 1445 UTC. Shows the hurricane and its setting.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Monday, 1 km resolution, August 14, 1995, 1445 UTC. Shows the robust internal structure of a happy storm.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Sunday, August 13, 1995, 1145 UTC at 2 km resolution. The true extent of the hurricane is apparent.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Sunday, August 13, 1995, 1145 UTC at 1 km resolution. More details are visible, of course, but the area is smaller to fit onto your screen. The eye almost closed over night.
  • Hurricane Felix in the Sargasso Sea on Saturday, August 12, 1995. The eye of the hurricane is well-developed. Haiti is in the lower left hand corner.
• Hurricane Erin
  • On August 3rd, Hurricane Erin comes ashore over Pensacola Florida, after spending the night energizing itself in the Gulf of Mexico.
  • On August 2nd, dawn discovers Hurricane Erin over western Florida, after spending the night partying on the peninsula.
  • Weather radar movie (4 MBytes) of Hurricane Erin crossing Florida in the night.
  • On August 1st, sunset shows Hurricane Erin approaching Florida in color.
  • Hurricane Erin movie (3.5 MB) from SSEC.
• The heat islands of the East Coast, a look at midday on July 31, 1995 using the new surface temperature-sensitive channel #2 at 3.9 microns. The I-95 corridor from New York City, through Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC is obvious. You can also see the Pittsburgh-to-Youngstown corridor, the Toronto sprawl, Buffalo, and the secondary cities across upper New York state and throughout the Appalachian valleys.
• Tropical storm Chantal stalled in the Sargasso Sea on 14 July 1995.
• Summer sunshine movie -- an hourly series of sunrise images across the western hemisphere on 3 July 1995, showing the sun on the North Pole.
• New Mexico thunderstorm, a rapid scan movie, 12 visible images between 2 and 3 pm Mountain Daylight Time on 29 June 1995.
• Hurricane Allison
  Allison appeared just after GOES-8 became operational as GOES-EAST on June 1, replacing METEOSAT-3.
  • As a close up movie
  • As a colorized movie
  • Large image in garish multi-spectral color
  • Small image in muted in multi-spectral colors
  • Full resolution visible
  • Seen in the global context

Semi-Operational Results

• Fog evaporating in valleys of New York and Pennsylvania on the morning of May 27, 1995. The dendritic appearance of the watersheds makes them look like the grand canyons of the East Coast that they really are.
• While looking for the Panama Canal in GOES-8 visible imagery, we find powerful oceanic sun-glint north and south of the isthmus during an unusually clear moment near midday on May 19,1995. The sun-glint north of the isthmus is punctuated by 3 overlapping circles of darker water, presumably roughened by outflow from individual thunderstorms. There are some very dark clouds in the brightly lighted scene, too. Oceanic sun-glint is commonly visible at the limbs of the earth, ranging from dawn in North Africa to sunset in Alaska.
• Movie of storm in Maryland on May 17th, which washed out the tennis game of our illustrious GOES Project Scientist. So, he went back to his office and made this movie.
• Movie of storm and tornado outbreak in Georgia on May 15, 1995, along with full-resolution stills at: 2202 UTC, 2215 UTC, 2232 UTC, 2245 UTC, 2315 UTC, 2332 UTC, 2345 UTC.
• Line of thunderstorms march down northern Florida on 21 April 1995, in a series of enhanced high-resolution visible images. Sea breeze effects and an upper air jet are apparent in central and south Florida, too. The need for image enhancement is apparent is a simpler low-resolution movie, without corrections for sun angle.
• MPEG movie of rotating contrails caught in a jet over Ontario, Canada on March 29, 1995. The apparent rotation is due to faster winds in the core of the jet than on the edges. The easily followed motion suggests that man-made contrails should be used to calculate cloud-tracked winds at in the upper air, where natural cirrus clouds are indistinct and more difficult to track. Knowing the aircraft's flight path, the clouds' altitude could be determined far more accurately than by using the contrail's apparent temperature.
• Morning sun-glint near north Africa, makes a pretty sunrise. The rainy areas south of the Sahara are visible from Senegal to Nigeria. A few days later, the glint is right in the river valleys. On a clear day, Iberia and Morocco, can be seen clearly at the east limb, too. By looking further east, you can also see spectacular sun-glint in the lee of the Cape Verde islands, on 26 April 95, a few weeks after a volcanic eruption there.
• Tropical cirrus visible at grazing angles near sunset. By looking almost into the setting sun, the strong forward scattering of sunlight lets one see the column of atmosphere at the limb of the earth in the subtropics. There is a thin band of enhanced scattering at an altitude approximately 10 km above the surface, where one expects a haze of otherwise undetectable cirrus clouds. The cirrus layer helps to display the small errors in pointing that GOES-8 makes near the limb -- there is a "ripple" where the successive east- and west-going scans do not quite match.
• Movie showing 3 days of thunderstorms over Peru. This series in the 11 micron channel was used by NASA pilots flying out of Lima to chase thunderstorms at night in an attempt to photograph "sprites", cloud-to-stratosphere giant lightning bolts. Result: they saw some!
• Colorized MPEG movie of all 19 Sounder channels for the hourly frame over the North America at 02:44 UTC, 11 Feb. 95 (10 pm EST, Feb. 10, 1995). The color table is provide intensity and/or hue differentiation over a wide range of brightness temperatures, which may be more obvious in a mini-poster.
  Colorized QT movie of all 19 Sounder channels.
  The GOES Sounder was designed to see down from the stratosphere to the ground in channels 1 to 8, lower stratospheric ozone in channel 9, upper tropospheric moisture in channels 10 to 12, various temperature layers in channels 13 to 15, surface conditions in channels 16 to 18, and reflected visible in channels 19. Since this set was taken near midnight, only the crescent earth is visible. Because of residual calibration difficulties, the mid-wave and short-wave channels show non-zero temperatures in outer space and significant striping in one detector of channel 19 across the face of the Earth, due a typographical error in our table of wavelengths for one of the four detectors being used.
• An animated 24 hours on January 5-6th in the 6.7 micron channel. The movie is colorized to help visually separate clouds (greys), upper air moisture (yellows) and dry slots (blues). You can see all the way down to the ground through the dry slots over Mexico and the southwest USA. NOAA hopes to use this channel for tracking mid-level winds using the moisture patterns without getting confused by clouds or ground clutter.
• 10 day animation of the East Coast last Xmas (3.5 MBytes). The frame covers from southern Canada to the southern tip of Florida and from the Mississippi River to New England. The greyscale movie uses the 3.9 micron window with an inverted brightness scale so that cold cloud-tops look white and the warmer ground looks dark, especially during the day. Reflected sunlight and makes the more reflective clouds look "black" during the day, too. Before Xmas, 3 weak storms meander about, never quite intensifying or merging. Between Xmas and New Year's Day, a cold air mass moves over the East Coast, exposing the land and oceans. After New Year's, typical wintertime upper air westerlies dominate, scuttling clouds across the country. There are approximately 4 frames per hour per day for 10 days, making a 1000 frame movie that was a hit at the January 1995 American Meteorological Society meeting in Dallas, Texas. Occasional jumps in scene position are due to changes in the attitude of the GOES-8 satellite, which didn't have its image navigation system tuned up yet.
• The full globe is observed only once every 3 hours by GOES-8, as demonstrated in a 24-hour animation using the 11 micron channel on December 27, 1994.
• Global animation from the NOAA observing schedule appears helter-skelter, as demonstrated with a 6.7 micron water vapor movie made from 12 hours of GOES-8 operational data from 8 December 1994 (1 Mbyte MPEG). The line errors in this animation are the result of poor reception that day at NASA-GSFC.
• The hop-around sectors are designed by a NOAA committee to provide four mesoscale images per hour of the contiguous United States (CONUS), instead of just two per hour. The old GOES-7 schedule provides two full-disk images every hour that communicate a more synoptic view of the Earth's weather. To get both speed and coverage, we would need either another Imager in space or twice as many detectors in future Imagers. NOAA is considering the issue.
• Tropical storm Gordon trying to be a hurricane, and the coastal remnants at full resolution, 17 November 1994, 10:45 am EST, covering the southeast coasts of the USA with a wide variety of cloud formations. Gordon's image has been histogram-equalized to make a good showing of the wide range of brightness in the original data. By the next day, Hurricane Gordon had achieved its ambition, churning east of Cape Hatteras. Gordon looks good in multi-spectral color, using the thermal infrared channels to identify the low-level clouds with "warmer" colors (Florida is dark purple in the lower left corner).

Early Infrared Sounding Data

• GOES-8 sounding began in July. Here are some engineering test images of the upper Midwest using all 19 Sounder channels on 28 July 1994 at 06:39 UTC: channel-by-channel movie and channel-by-channel mosaic. The mosaic also lists the main purpose of each channel. The missing 4x11 groups of pixels are data blocks dropped by the NASA ground system. The strange intensity lines at the top of the frame was due to a bug in the ground calibration software at that time. Because the observations are at local midnight, there is no visible data in channel 19.
• Check to see if the University of Wisconsin is posting some of their soundings yet.

Early Multi-Spectral Images

• Multi-spectral GOES-8 Imager variations on the full Earth , presented as a time-series. These combinations use only the IR channels. The difference between the brightness temperatures of channels 2 and 4 is the reflected sunlight in the 3.9 micron channel, which is especially strong for the clouds containing small droplets. The difference in brightness temperature between channels 4 and 5 indicates the total water vapor in the column down to the surface or to a cloudtop. Various RGB combinations of channels 2, 3 and 4 with the 2-4 and 4-5 differences provide colorful impressions of the combined cloud and water vapor structures of the atmosphere. Because the visible channel is not used, these multi-spectral combinations should work well 24 hours per day. By the way, the dot in the upper left quadrant of outer space is the Moon.
• Contrails headed for Haiti midday on Sunday, Sept. 18th. The contrails appear magenta in this image, which maps the visible and 4 micron channels into red and blue.
• A "natural color" image of the 3/4 globe, constructed using only the visible and 11 micron infrared channel, provides the illusion of green earth, blue water and white clouds. With a little artistic license, the same picture can have polar caps added to make a full earth, a GOES-8 view that will not be used by NOAA operationally, to save a little scan time. The original GOES-8 "natural color" full-earth image containing Hurricane Andrew is available at high resolution (WARNING: 10 MByte MacBinary file in Adobe Photoshop 3 format)
• A "False color" image of the 3/4 globe, constructed using the visible with both the 3.9 and 11 micron infrared channels, provides more subtle color-coded information about the nature of the clouds.
• GSFC's first crude multi-spectral movie of full Earth, made using channels 1, 2 and 4 (0.5, 3.9 and 11 microns) with hourly data collected on August 24, 1994.
• A false-color mosaic using all five channels can indicate cloud features, moisture content, and surface conditions over the northeastern quarter of North America. Each of the individual Imager channels are shown along with the multi-channel composite.
• Urban heat islands, visible in the 3.9 micron channel at 11 pm CDT on 11 July 1994, reaching from the Atlantic coast to the MidWest. Many small cities are visible, including Ft. Wayne, Indiana, where ITT builds the GOES-I/M instruments.
• The Amazon watershed is very warm beneath the thunderclouds in the equatorial river basin at the top of the image. Many forest fires burn in the remote highlands throughout the lower left quadrant, easily observed at local midnight (04 UTC on 12 July 1994) using the GOES-8 3.9 and 11 micron windows.
• GOES-8 views the Earth's limb at sunset in the north Pacific on July 12, 1994: Channel 1, visible, channel 4, 11 micron long-wave thermal, channel 2, 3.9 micron short-wave thermal and reflected sunlight, channel 1, visible at full resolution, with a nice contrail and its shadow. NOAA is not sure that it needs visible imagery near local midnight, but the folks in Alaska might disagree. An hour later, the limb remains sharp enough to see a single contrail and its shadow on the great circle route to Alaska. It may be possible to estimate cloud-tracked winds in the Gulf of Alaska.
• Multi-spectral view of the Mid-Atlantic states for 2 June 1994. The two dark smudges along the North Carolina coastline are thermal hot spots, probably large brush or forest fires in the dried-out swamps.
• A three-channel false-color image of North America shows that the infrared channels are well-aligned and able to distinguish among cloud types.
• If you want to try your own multi-channel combinations, and you can read TIFF images, grab these big images of North America at 4 km resolution for the five channels:
  • channel 1 - visible,
  • channel 2 - 3.9 micron IR (with some reflected sunlight; find it!),
  • channel 3 - 6.7 micron IR,
  • channel 4 - 11 micron IR,
  • channel 5 - 12 micron IR.
  Each of these images is a approximately 2.5 Mbytes (1,000 lines by 2,000 pixels), over-sampled by the satellite at a rate of 7/4 in the east-west direction. Imager calibration formulas and coefficients are available for people who want to try their hand at multi-spectral algorithms.
• An image of western North America, presented as the simple difference between the 3.9 and 11 micron window channels, enhances the reflected sunlight in the 3.9 micron window.

Early Visible Images

• Jet contrails all over Ohio on Xmas day. Noontime finds Santa's airlines busy chris-crossing the upper air. There was debate before launch whether GOES-8 could detect "man-made" patterns on Earth. Does this qualify?
• Brazilian deforestation observed from GOES-8 in November 1994, and confirmed by an old Landsat image from 1988. The area observed by Landsat is found in the lower right hand area of the GOES image. The entire deforested area in the right hand side of the GOES image is approximately the size of Pennsylvania.
• Rapid storm development at 1-minute intervals captured on the afternoon of July 20, 1994, near Tulsa, Oklahoma. Overshooting cloud-tops, gravity waves and outflow are quite apparent in two 20-minute sequences presented on a videotape by Jim Purdom at Colorado State. The second sequence still looks good when zoomed up, although the data compression artifacts in an MPEG movie become more apparent. The GOES-8 satellite can deliver 5-band multi-spectral imagery over 1000x1000 km regions at 1-minute intervals until interrupted by "housekeeping" activities a few times per hour. ("Housekeeping" consists of on-board radiometric calibration and looking for bright stars to determine pointing.) The midwest can produce entire colonies of thunderstorms, as captured near sunset in a single frame 10 days earlier.
• A nice "moon shot" which happened to also be the first official image for the new GOES antenna system at NASA-GSFC. The moon looks skewed because the satellite is panning at 15 degree per hour to follow the earth, so that every other scan of background objects appear 4.4 seconds later and eastward in the sequence. The east-west slewing makes groups of two 8-detector scans close together at the west side and far apart at the east side. A comparison between moon shots by GOES-7 and GOES-8 shows how differently the satellites operate, and how much the moon's appearance changes over the months due to variations in the moon's orbit and rotation.
• Sun glare movies for August 24th, in the GOES-8 visible, with less in the 3.9 micron IR, and not apparent in the 11 micron IR. GOES-7 and GMS-4 suffer similar glare at their local midnights. Normal sun glint occurs in reflection from the oceans and clouds when the sun is behind and to the side of the satellite.
• Visible contrails and fog near Vancouver late in the afternoon on 10 July 1994, much better seen in the new infrared window channel. You can also see the cold bright snowcapped top of Mt. Rainier in all channels.
• Thunderstorms over the Midwest at sunset, 10 July 1994, showing off the great dynamic range of GOES-8 from cloud highlights to long cloud shadows on the even darker Earth.
• GOES-8 full resolution visible to the north limb, showing the value of good resolution for observing Canadian weather. That is fog in Hudson's Bay, half overlaid by cirrus, but you can't tell that without the IR.
• GOES-8 full earth at 16 km resolution, resampled to be round.
• Here is a reduced version of the big file: GOES-8 full earth at 32 km resolution, NOT resampled to be round.
• Here is a high-resolution comparison between GOES-7 and GOES-8 in one of the few areas around the USA with cloudy weather that day: clouds and thunderstorms over southern Florida, the Bahamas and Cuba. On that day, GOES-7 visible detectors were well-normalized, and so its striping, blur and limited brightness range become obvious only when you look more closely at the storms around Cuba, especially the thunderhead over the Bahamas.
• A split-image of Hurricane Carlotta, as seen simultaneously by GOES-8 and GOES-7. The image was produced by SSEC/Wisconsin, attempting to validate the prediction they made on the cover of BAMS (May 94) for the expected improvement in image quality.

Early Infrared Images

• Water vapor-controlled radiation losses are revealed by 6.7 micron imagery. The top millimeter of water vapor in the atmosphere provides a greenhouse effect comparable to doubling carbon dioxide, and the GOES-8 satellite now provides hourly maps of the upper air moisture as it is injected by convection in the tropics, twisted by advection at mid-latitudes, and removed by subsidence in the subtropics, shown in:
  • MPEG animation (290 kbytes)
  • flattened Quicktime movie format (1300 kbytes)

First Infrared Image

• Full Earth at 11 microns. The standard thermal view.
• Full Earth at 12 microns. This channel can be differenced with the 11 micron image to show water vapor.
• Full Earth at 6.7 microns. Water vapor in the upper troposphere. The dark (warm) streaks indicate dry slots.
• Full Earth at 3.9 microns. A thermal view that is less sensitive to water vapor and more sensitive to clouds than the standard 11 micron view.
• GOES-8 vs GOES-7 high-resolution comparison. GOES-8 gives sharper infrared views of cloud details than GOES-7.

First Visible Image

• Full Earth, 512x512.
• Full Earth, 1024x1024. Corresponding NASA-enhanced visible image of the full Earth, compared to the NOAA effort.
• Full Earth, 2048x2048.
• East Coast, 512x512.
• East Coast, 1024x1024.
• GOES-8 vs GOES-7 low-resolution comparison for the northern hemisphere.
• GOES-8 vs GOES-7 high-resolution comparison, geometrically remapped over Wisconsin. There is no sign of east-west shear in this GOES-8 image, even though the new GOES-8 satellite scans back-and forth. Here is a brighter version of the same picture, that brings out the individual pixels.

Eclipse Images

• 25 December 2000
  The first solar eclipse observed by GOES on a Christmas Day.
  • Christmas Eclipse (0.5 MB QT) movie of the moon's shadow crossing Canada at midday. Contrast was greatly enhanced to bring out the moon's shadow in the feeble winter sunlight near the arctic circle just after the shortest day of the year there. Folks in the USA witnessed a partial eclipse at lunchtime along the east coast.
• 26 February 1998
  GOES-8 observed the spectacular midday solar eclipse along the north coast of South America.
  • GOES-8 1 km resolution QuickTime animation of Aruba (2.5 MBytes)
  • GOES-8 2 km resolution QuickTime animation of Central America (1.8 MBytes)
  • large high-quality GOES-10 and GOES-8 TIFF images (1.2 MBytes each)
• 29 April 1995
  GOES-8 observed the eclipse in equatorial South America.
  • GOES-8's ground track sails through solar eclipse.
  • Individual frames are available every half-hour for the globe.
  • Higher resolution images during the April '95 eclipse are available for the region around Peru. The only full-earth frame is at 1745Z, near local noon, a frame which we have annotated, to mark the path of the eclipse and the location of GOES-8.
• 10 May 1994
  GOES-8 observed the solar eclipse over the central United States.
  • Single visible image from GOES-8 during the solar eclipse, courtesy of SSEC.
  • Here is a mini-movie made from the high resolution still images from GOES-8, originally posted at SSEC.
  • GOES-7 captured the entire eclipse sequence.