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Current Australian Region Satellite Images

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Satellite | Satellite Products and Archive | About Satellite Images



News 29/04/03: Temporary backup of GMS-5 with GOES-9
New productColour-Enhanced Australian Region Satellite Images

Satellite image Latest Colour IR Image

   Colour Infrared Loop

Animation of the
last 4 images


Satellite image Latest IR Image

   Infrared Loop

Animation of the
last 4 images


Satellite image Latest VIS Image

Note: Colour Infrared images are about 80KB each.

The satellite images above are obtained from the GOES-9 satellite and are provided with the permission of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the United States' National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Any use of these images requires the following acknowledgement: "GMS-5 backup with GOES-9 operated by the joint effort of JMA and US NOAA NESDIS over the western Pacific."

The types of images available are:

  • New productColour Enhanced IR satellite images.These images are generated by superimposing the Infrared Cloud images over a topographic background. image. Low cloud, fog or thin cirrus cloud is shown as transparent light blue, mid-level cloud is grey and multi-layered, thick cloud is white. The land/sea background can be seen in cloud-free areas where the darker colours represent higher elevations.
  • IR satellite images. In this imagery, the brightness is directly related to the temperature as seen from the satellite. The coldest areas, such as high cloud tops, show up as white. Warmer areas, such as the ocean or the land surface during the day, show up as darker shades of grey. These images are available 24 hours per day.
  • Visible satellite images . These images show reflected visible sunlight as seen from the satellite. Because they rely on light from the Sun, these images are only available during daylight hours. The terminator, the line separating daytime and nighttime, can be clearly seen in these images. Note also that these images have been corrected for the angle of the Sun and therefore the transition from day to night is abrupt rather than gradual.

GOES-9 images are available every hour. Full-disk images (i.e. from pole to pole) from GOES-9 start scanning at 25 minutes past the hour e.g. 12:25 UTC.

The time stamp on the images is in UTC which is 10 hours behind Australian EST. The images supplied here are 12 kilometre resolution 640x512 pixel Lambert conformal projections, standard latitudes 30S and 50S and meridian 130E, at 5 bits per pixel. Note that these images are not a photograph but instead are scanned, line-by-line. The time stamp is the start time of the image reception from the satellite, corresponding to the topmost line of the image. It takes approximately 30 minutes for GOES-9 to complete a scan of the Earth's disk and the image is available on the Web within 30 minutes of completion, i.e an hour after the time stamp.

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