Zayd Amundson1, Kevin Micke1, Curtis J. Seaman1, Natalie Tourville1, Steve Finley1, Leigh Cheatwood-Harris1, and Daniel T. Lindsey2
1 CIRA, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO
2 NOAA/NESDIS/GOES-R, Fort Collins, CO
Requested format: ePoster
To be presented at the 2025 AMS Annual Meeting
41st Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies
The Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Realtime (SLIDER) website (https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu) was developed at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) for the display of full resolution geostationary satellite imagery in realtime. In 2017, when the website first launched, SLIDER offered imagery from Himawari-8 and GOES-16 - the first two geostationary satellites of the current generation defined by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and its siblings (Advanced Himawari Imager [AHI] and Advanced Meteorological Imager [AMI]). Since then, SLIDER has been expanded to include GOES-West (GOES-17/18), Meteosat Second Generation (Meteosat-8/9/10/11) and Geo-KOMPSAT-2A, with plans to include Meteosat Third Generation (MTG-I1) as soon as the data are made publicly available. These satellites combine to provide nearly complete coverage of the tropics and mid-latitudes as viewed from the geostationary orbit. SLIDER’s ability to deliver low-latency, high-resolution geostationary satellite imagery with looping capability, product overlay and comparison tools, and other data interrogation tools has made it a go-to resource for operational forecasters, professional and amateur satellite meteorologists and the education/training community around the world. For example, a recent study by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) determined that SLIDER was the most popular resource for viewing satellite imagery among forecasters throughout North and South America. Through interaction with forecasters throughout the Asia-Pacific region, we also know that SLIDER is heavily used in many smaller nations that have limited resources available for acquiring satellite data.
A companion effort at CIRA, supported by NOAA, developed a website (https://slider-archive.cira.colostate.edu) with a SLIDER-like user interface (UI) that allows users to browse CIRA’s extensive archive of ABI Geocolor imagery produced for SLIDER, and marry this imagery with the level-1b (L1b) and level-2 (L2) data products stored on NOAA’s cloud computing infrastructure. This website allows users to browse the imagery or search the database of known high-impact events, and acquire both the Full resolution Geocolor imagery and the ABI data from which it was derived.
Since Geocolor isn’t the extent of archive imagery at CIRA, developers are working on an ordering mechanism to allow users to explore more imagery products other than Geocolor, while still providing a fast, responsive website.
While this initial project is focused on ABI data/imagery, lessons learned may open avenues for similar efforts to link CIRA’s wealth of imagery to data provided by other geostationary satellite programs. This talk will provide an overview of the current SLIDER and Archive websites and their capabilities and discuss the future of imagery ordering, making more of CIRA’s archive available to the world.
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