Cool sat imagery

[Bob Schafer]

Just surfing around a little the last few minutes, I found this:

CLICK HERE

Apparently, it is an IR and visible image composite, with emphasis on the visible at night, I guess, since you can see city lights from around the country.

Pretty cool, huh?

Still dark in NOLA.

Check out the Region/Sector button for options there too, though it doesn't seem as though you can zoom on that IR/Vis product.

Bob

(GO BRONCOS!!!!!!!)

MOD: used URL tag to hide super-long link

 

[B Ozanne]

Are you really looking at city lights? I don't think so. I think that is just super-imposed where the lights should be.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Yeah, the lights are static, from 2003 data:

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on 14 September 2005, the eastern half of the United States lies in total darkness, while the western half is still illuminated by late afternoon sun. City lights are not apparent on the nighttime side of the GOES visible scene because this satellite detector lacks adequate sensitivity to these relatively weak light emissions (several orders of magnitude fainter than the minimum detectable signal). Color backgrounds are not available from GOES because this sensor lacks the red/green/blue channels required to render true color imagery.

In the foreground are the GOES E/W satellite visible and infrared datasets (divided at the 100°W meridian). The daytime background to the GOES visible imagery is the NASA Blue Marble (based on a composite of cloud-cleared imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)). On the nighttime side, a customized scene that incorporates the National Geophysical Data Center’s (NGDC) 2003 Nighttime Lights of the World database (based on the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS) satellite sensors) is used beneath infrared imagery.
...
The main caveat users must always be aware of when using this product is that the backgrounds (ie, the Blue Marble and NGDC nighttime city lights) are indeed static. As such, almost all dynamics pertaining to the background will not be captured in this product. Unless some aspect of the change is captured in the real-time GOES visible/infrared observations, it will not be represented. For example, seasonal changes in vegetation, power outages, river plumes, variation of nighttime land brightness with lunar phase, etc, or impacts from a natural disaster, may not be represented in real-time imagery produced from this method.

---> http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/focus_public/pr...at_GeoColor.pdf

Cool images nonetheless, however!!