GOES-12 Imagery of Hurricane Katrina: Visible Close-up (WMS)

The GOES-12 satellite sits at 75 degrees west longitude at an altitude of 36,000 kilometers over the equator, in geosynchronous orbit. At this position its Imager instrument takes pictures of cloud patterns in several wavelengths for all of North and South America, a primary measurement used in weather forecasting. The Imager takes a pattern of pictures of parts of the Earth in several wavelengths all day, measurements that are vital in weather forecasting. This animation shows a daily sequence of GOES-12 images in the visible wavelengths, from 0.52 to 0.72 microns, during the period that Hurricane Katrina passed through the Gulf of Mexico. At one kilometer resolution, the visible band measurement is the highest resolution data from the Imager, which accounts for the very high level of detail in these images. For this animation, the cloud data was extracted from GOES image and laid over a background color image of the southeast United States.

See http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov