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Category: General interpretation

Welcome to Summer! (Summer Solstice 2025)

The summer solstice occurred on June 20th this year (2025). The summer solstice is the day with the longest period of daylight and the shortest night of the year in a given hemisphere, and marks the beginning of astronomical summer. In the Northern Hemisphere, it typically falls on June 20... Read More

Farewell, NOAA-18

Today at 17:40 UTC, NOAA decommissioned one of its three remaining legacy polar-orbiting weather satellites, NOAA-18. The spacecraft was launched on May 20th, 2005, and was declared operational on August 30th, 2005. For nearly 20 years, NOAA-18 collected weather information across the whole globe, with every point on Earth in... Read More

Elevated Optical Depth from Two Very Different Sources

The GOES-19 view of the Northern Hemisphere on the morning of 3 June 2025 showed enhanced aerosol optical depth (AOD) across much of its domain. Large regions of elevated AOD are ceen in the eastern half of the continental United States extending out into the western Atlantic Ocean, while the... Read More