US geostationary weather satellite imagery (NOAA GOES)
What it measures. Continuous, detailed imagery and measurements of the Western Hemisphere, including cloud and storm conditions, real-time lightning mapping, and space-weather observations, refreshed very frequently from a fixed vantage point.
How it's made. Collected by NOAA's GOES-R series satellites (GOES-16 through 19), which sit over the equator and stare at the same region; this includes raw, calibrated Level-1b sensor data.
How & where you'd use it. Central to US weather forecasting, hurricane and severe-storm tracking, and emergency response across the Americas.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span— → ongoing
What you can do with it
- Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
- Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
- Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description
NEW GOES-19 Data!! On April 4, 2025 at 1500 UTC, the GOES-19 satellite will be declared the Operational GOES-East satellite. All products and services, including NODD, for GOES-East will transition to GOES-19 data at that time. GOES-19 will operate out of the GOES-East location of 75.2°W starting on April 1, 2025 and through the operational transition. Until the transition time and during the final stretch of Post Launch Product Testing (PLPT), GOES-19 products are considered non-operational regardless of their validation maturity level. Shortly following the transition of GOES-19 to GOES-East, all data distribution from GOES-16 will be turned off. GOES-16 will drift to the storage location at 104.7°W. GOES-19 data should begin flowing again on April 4th once this maneuver is complete. NEW GOES 16 Reprocess Data!! The reprocessed GOES-16 ABI L1b data mitigates systematic data issues (including data gaps and image artifacts) seen in the Operational products, and improves the stability of both the radiometric and geometric calibration over the course of the entire mission life. These data were produced by recomputing the L1b radiance products from input raw L0 data using improved calibration algorithms and look-up tables, derived from data analysis of the NIST-traceable, on-board sources. In addition, the reprocessed data products contain enhancements to the L1b file format, including limb pixels and pixel timestamps, while maintaining compatibility with the operational products. The datasets currently available span the operational life of GOES-16 ABI, from early 2018 throug
Get the data
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs
fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).
Official links
- Open data source NOAA Open Data