The Satellite Page

The Weather Satellite Page

The British are always going on about the weather - that's because we really have weather ! Not like those places where it never changes day in, day out. So predictable you never need to think. Here in the UK it's never the same two days on end, so if the weather has any influence on our activities, some sort of forecasting is definitely called for. How to do that ? Well you could just peer out of the window and see what's coming next, but that's a bit limiting and doesn't give much of a look ahead. The higher the viewpoint, the more you can see, so why not go the whole way and view from space itself, right outside the planet...

This is what satellites let you do and there are now a great many to choose from - besides weather forecasting, there are ones for military use, land surveying, crop monitoring, tracking marine fauna & flora, telecommunications - a brief selection of just a few better known uses. For quite a few satellites, it's perfectly possible for an interested person to acquire the means to see images for themselves. That's what I'd like to try to show below and on following pages.

First of all, what can one see from a satellite ? Here are a couple of images which are typical of one type of satellite used for weather monitoring:

The image in the left shows a part of the UK during the passage of a rather deep depression in it final stages. (It's an infra-red image where the land sometimes is hard to see.) That on the right shows most of the UK and Ireland situated directly under an intense anticyclone (giving some most exceptionally fine weather !)

By studying carefully the features which can be seen, it's perfectly possible to make quite accurate predictions of what's coming next and this is precisely what the professionals use too, though make no mistake, they have plenty of other things in their armoury as well. On the following pages I'd like to go through some of the most important features of satellite imaging - just follow the links:

I do hope that you will find it all interesting - feedback is always nice ! Anti-spam: Be sure to correct the dotted punctuation !

Please note: all NOAA satellite images displayed on these pages are NOAA copyright and are displayed with their permission.

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Last updated March 2006
Development of these pages has been held up for a long time due to other committments.
I very much hope to return to them shortly.
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