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Full catalog/HIMAWARI
HIMAWARI·dataset

East Asia and Pacific weather satellite imagery (Japan's Himawari)

JMA Himawari-8/9
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Constant, uniform imagery of East Asia and the western and central Pacific, capturing typhoons, volcanoes, and general weather systems from a fixed point about 35,800 km above the equator.

How it's made. Recorded by Japan's geostationary Himawari-9 satellite (with Himawari-8 as backup), with full-disk archive imagery available back to July 2015; NOAA distributes the data.

How & where you'd use it. Round-the-clock monitoring of storms and hazards across the Asia-Pacific, supporting forecasting and disaster response.

What's measured

aws-pdsagriculturegeospatialweatherearth observationmeteorologicaldisaster responsesatellite imagery

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

Himawari-9, stationed at 140.7E, owned and operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), is a geostationary meteorological satellite, with Himawari-8 as on-orbit back-up, that provides constant and uniform coverage of east Asia, and the west and central Pacific regions from around 35,800 km above the equator with an orbit corresponding to the period of the earth’s rotation. This allows JMA weather offices to perform uninterrupted observation of environmental phenomena such as typhoons, volcanoes, and general weather systems. Archive data back to July 2015 is available for Full Disk (AHI-L1b-FLDK) products in the bucket. For questions regarding Himawari-9 imagery specifications, visit the JMA site at https://www.data.jma.go.jp/mscweb/en/himawari89/space_segment/spsg_ahi.html. For examples of Full Disk Himawari-9 imagery coverage, visit the NOAA Himawari-9 data page at https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/imagery/himawari.html.

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# 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).