Iowa Environmental Mesonet

Iowa State University Department of Agronomy

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Nav: GIS > GOES Satellite GIS Products

The GOES (Geostationary Satellite) provide the commonly seen views of clouds from space. The National Weather Service is now publishing data from these satellites in GIS formats. Thanks to the generous support of UNIDATA, the IEM processes this data feed and provides OGC compliant web services as well as an archive.

IEM Processing

Data from the GOES birds is available twice an hour (:15 and :45 after the hour). The most recent product is over 30 minutes old. The raw data files are very large (70 MB TIFF images for visible). The IEM does make these files available, but they are too large for archiving in their highest resolution form. For that reason, the IEM generates a 4km CONUS composite of the East and West GOES birds for the archive and realtime apps.

Please Note: This still remains a work in progress. Please let us know if you have any ideas on how this service can be improved.

Raw GIS Products

GOES East/West GeoTiff images for manual download
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/data/gis/images/4326/goes/
The "1V" products are 1km Visible. The "04I4" products are 4km infrared.

Conus GeoTiff images for manual download
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/data/gis/images/4326/sat/
These images are generated by the IEM by combining data from the GOES East and West satellites.

OGC Web Map Service

WMS URLs
Conus GOES visible imagery
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/goes/conus_vis.cgi?

Conus GOES infrared imagery
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/goes/conus_ir.cgi?

GOES East infrared imagery
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/goes/east_ir.cgi?

GOES West infrared imagery
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/goes/west_ir.cgi?

GOES East visible imagery
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/goes/east_vis.cgi?

GOES West visible imagery
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/goes/west_vis.cgi?

Note: To get the WMS capabilities, you need to add
VER=1.1.1&SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=GetCapabilities
to the URIs above. Your WMS application may require it.

Archive

The IEM is archiving the 4km visible and infrared composites. This archive exists since 20 December 2005. Currently, the only way to download data is to manually browse the IEM's data archive.

Today's archive of conus imagery (GeoTiff)
http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/archive/data/2008/07/04/GIS/sat/
The URL pattern contains the year, month, and day. The datafiles have timestamps in UTC.

Online Applications