Exciting New Features, Products, and Satellites Added to SLIDER Satellite Imagery Looper

Access to real-time and archived satellite imagery over the web is one of the key tools necessary to better understand extreme weather events. After launching for public beta testing in June 2017, SLIDER, short for Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer in Real-time, has found its place in the Weather Enterprise as a useful tool for quickly exploring extremely high-resolution satellite imagery, and is available at http://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/ . Developed by the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) in partnership with the Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch (RAMMB), located at Colorado State University (CSU), this web application provides every pixel of real-time imagery from multiple satellite such as GOES-16 and Himawari-8. The easy-to-use interface allows both the scientific community and the general public to zoom in on interesting features to view imagery at full-resolution, overlay different imagery products or compare them side-by-side, easily share loops with colleagues and friends, and much more. In the past year, significant upgrades have been made to both the SLIDER interface itself and the products that it displays. One of the major new features is the ability to follow specific features in the imagery, creating customized storm-relative loops by keeping the feature centered on the screen. One of the most-frequently requested features, downloadable animated GIFs, is currently under development. Other upgrades include new maps to provide options like roads, rivers, and additional political boundaries, and the ability to view the latitude and longitude of any given pixel in the imagery. Some of the new products that have been added include data from the new GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), radar data from the Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system, and some of CIRA’s newly-developed derived products. Imagery from other satellites is also being incorporated into SLIDER, such as VIIRS imagery from polar-orbiting satellites like the new NOAA-20, which is presented in a geostationary-like projection over the north and south poles to make it easier to look at this incredibly high-resolution imagery. Other improvements include a major storage upgrade which made it possible to significantly increase the length of the imagery archive. This presentation will share details about and demonstrations of some of these exciting new features, products, and satellites and how they’re helping a variety of users better understand extreme weather events in real-time. Examples will include events such as Hurricane Harvey making landfall on the Texas coast on 25 August 2017 ( https://col.st/nki0t ) and the historic 2018 fire season in the western US ( https://col.st/DynOU ).