Satellite imagery animation sectors

The links below take you to real-time animations of mostly visible imagery from two US geostationary meteorological satellites. They simplify access of specific areas for those not wanting to use the NASA Marshall Space flight Center website from which they were generated. I generated these specific sectors for use within this website (they can be cut/pasted into different parts of this website as needed). Of course, you can open them and then bookmark them for your own faster reference.

Most sectors are for areas outside the US because there are many websites that display well the US areas from the same satellites. Fewer websites show detailed views of othere countries, though the imagery is available and the NASA website above can display any region equally (within the satellite’s view of course). I have not shown imagery from Asia or Africa because geostationary satellite imagery for these regions comes from non-US satellites and is less readily available to the public (or has less time or space resolution).

Most links look similar but you can change the links to change your options. For example, the Oklahoma sector link is:

https://weather.msfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/get-abi?satellite=GOESEastconusband02&lat=35.6&lon=-96.6&zoom=2&type=Animation&numframes=30&width=1400&height=1000&quality=80

Note that you can change the center point latitude and longitude (here 35.6 and -96.6), the zoom can be 1, 2 or 4, the number of frames in the animation can be up to 50 (I put 30) and the pixel width of the images can be up to 1400 (horizontal) by 1000 (vertical). The jpg compression quality can be from 0 to 100 (80 chosen here). For slow connections you should reduce the size of the images and/or lower the compression number (say 50 instead of 80). Imagery is updated either every 5 or 10 minutes depending on the sector.

Note that the resolution is mentioned for each sector – usually either 500 m or 1 km. This is the dimension of a (square) pixel at the sub-satellite point on the Equator. Resolution gets worse and the viewing angle increases (towards the poles or limbs of the Earth from the satellite’s perspective). These satellites have 500 meter pixel resolution under ideal conditions. For more details see here.

Because the sector size is limited by the NASA website to 1400 by 1000 pixels there is a trade-off between the area covered and the pixel resolution of the images. If you want to see more detail you must accept less geographical coverage of your animation. That is why I chose 500m and 1 km loops for some areas. And even 2 km resolution loops for very large areas. In the links you will see something like “&zoom=2”. There are zooms of 1, 2 or 4 (no 3). The 1 corresponds to 500m (nominal) pixels, the 2 is 1 km and the 4 is 2 km. The Infrared imagery best resolution is 2 km.

Some final points. Some sectors have either coastlines or political boundaries on them. If you don’t want political boundaries or coastlines add “&map=none” at the end of the link. This is an option that can be eliminated – I chose to leave it on some of the animations that tend to be more cloudy on average – it helps viewers navigate the geography. The grids are slightly off – this is especially noticeable for some coastlines (e.g. Hawaiian or Galapagos Islands). For the most part the benefit of leaving the coastlines on outweighs the disadvantages. Finally, don’t forget to play with the slider at the top to adjust the animation speed. The default looping speed is likely not the best for showing some features. Faster looping is usually better.

USA SECTORS

Oklahoma and surrounding states (1 km res)

Oklahoma full res (500 m res)

Hawaiian Islands (500 m res with coastlines)

Big Bend area Texas (500 m res)

Big Bend and Northern Mexico (1 km res)

S Florida (500 m res)

N Florida (500 m res)

Florida area (1 km res)

MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICAN SECTORS

Baja California (GOES-West, 1 km res)

Northwest Baja California+SW Arizona (500 m res)