Publishing GOES Satellite Data on a Geospatial Image Service

Traditionally, the NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) has distributed GOES weather satellite imagery as small sector images, usually a jpg or gif. With the launch of GOES-16, NESDIS has embraced a more modern approach to serving this imagery: NOAA Satellite Maps is a geospatial data Map Service to access imagery from the geostationary and polar satellites in our fleet.

We support open information sharing and integration through this RESTful Service, which can be used by a multitude of GIS software packages and web map applications (both open and commercially licensed) for free. One of the most important features of the Satellite Maps layers service is the interoperable nature of its data. Users can combine georeferenced data layers from other datasets together with the Satellite Maps data, allowing infinite opportunities for providing meaning and value to NOAA data. For example, GOES East infrared Band 10 data can be combined with Doppler radar data and Lightning data to see how cloud cover and instances of rain align during weather events.

Current Satellite Maps datasets include GOES East (GOES-16) Advanced Baseline Imager (in GeoColor, Band 10 - infrared water vapor, and Band 13 - infrared cloud temperature) updated every 15 minutes, and NOAA-20 (formerly JPSS-1) VIIRS TrueColor Global mosaics updated daily, as well as a Global Archive of Polar orbiting Suomi-NPP data dating back to 2014.

In this talk we will discuss how the public is accessing and downloading GOES imagery from our Satellite Maps service and lessons learned.