The view from above. Geostationary sectors zoom past the full-disk Earth View on the dashboard, specialty channels reveal what visible imagery hides — water vapor, infrared, RGB composites — and the research-grade tools from CIMSS and CIRA make every storm a high-resolution loop. Together they're the second observation layer alongside Radar: where ground-based scanning ends, satellite begins.
CONUS, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, Tropical Atlantic, Northeast, Gulf of Alaska — every sector GOES-East covers, in GeoColor, water vapor, infrared, and RGB composite products. The Earth View disk is the wide shot; sectors are the zoom.
Pacific Northwest, California, Hawaii, tropical Pacific, mesoscale sectors for individual storm systems. Paired with GOES-East, covers the Americas from Atlantic to mid-Pacific in finer detail than a full disk allows.
Upper-tropospheric water vapor for jet-stream analysis, infrared for nighttime convection, air mass RGB for weather-system identification, dust and sandstorm RGB, fire detection. What forecasters reach for when GeoColor isn't telling the story.
Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies — the research group behind the satellite products NHC relies on. Tropical cyclone imagery, Dvorak analysis, microwave passes, wind shear diagnostics. Where tropical forecasters spend their mornings.
Satellite Loop Interactive Data Explorer from CIRA at Colorado State. All four geostationary satellites in one viewer — GOES-East, GOES-West, Himawari-9, Meteosat — with deep-zoom pan, arbitrary loop length, and the full product suite (GeoColor, IR, water vapor, RGB composites, sandwich). What the static sector pulls above can't do: pick any point on Earth and zoom in until you can see individual cumulus.
Geostationary sector imagery from NOAA STAR (Center for Satellite Applications and Research). Tropical satellite analysis from the University of Wisconsin's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS). SLIDER from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University. Full-disk geostationary imagery for the four primary satellites lives on the dashboard's Earth View band; lightning detected from space (GOES GLM) lives on the Radar page alongside ground-network detection.