Visualizing multi-spectral satellite imagery in different color spaces

Compared to the legacy United States geostationary satellite imager, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) will collect images of the atmosphere in additional spectral bands at least every five minutes over the contiguous United States. The challenge at hand is determining how meteorologists can leverage this additional information to impact the forecast process without interrupting the forecaster workflow. With sufficient training for forecasters to understand the environmental scenarios in which certain bands are useful, multi-spectral satellite imagery provides an opportunity for the human analyst to easily and quickly identify spatial patterns that represent atmospheric features and contribute to a forecaster's mental model of the atmosphere.

Red-Green-Blue (RGB) tri-band composite imagery has been a popular technique for collocating and colorizing multiple bands to the benefit of the savvy analyst. This presentation discusses several other color spaces that may provide more color contrast than RGB composite imagery of atmospheric features. Examples from the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) over the western Pacific Ocean will be shown to highlight the benefits.