The shadow of the total solar eclipse of 09 March 2016 was captured by a number of geostationary satellites, including JMA Himawari-8 (above; also available as either a large 140 Mbyte animated GIF, or a YouTube video: large) | small) and KMA COMS-1 (below). The Himawari-8 true-color Red/Green/Blue (RGB) images were created using... Read More
Himawari-8 (Imagery courtesy of JMA) captured the northward march of three sets of Internal Waves in the Banda Sea in late October, as shown above (MODIS True Color Imagery showed the waves as well). Because the internal waves affect the ocean surface, sun glint can make them visible via methods described here. The fine spatial and temporal resolution of... Read More
A storage facility in Tianjin, China exploded shortly after 1500 UTC on 12 August 2015 (media story). Himawari-8, MTSAT-2 and COMS-1 all viewed the explosion that generated a strong thermal signature in the shortwave infrared band (3.75 µm – 3.9 µm). The animation above shows the benefit of Himawari-8’s speedier scanning... Read More
Imagery from the Korean COMS-1 satellite, above, shows Category 3 Typhoon Soudelor approaching the island of Taiwan. The eye appearance becomes ragged at the end of the animation, suggesting entrainment of dry air into the center of the Typhoon. Although Sea Surface Temperatures are warm (image taken from here), strengthening... Read More
