Real-Time U.S. Composite Satellite Image
The composite images displayed on our Real-Time U.S. Composite Satellite pages are created using SSEC's McIDAS software and NOAA's GOES imager satellite imagery. A McIDAS based program created by Rick Kohrs at SSEC is used to merge GOES East and GOES West images, remap them and then remove the portions of the images that are the ground and replace those pixels with NASA's big blue marble basemap. Determining which portions of the images are cloud and which are ground is done via a cloud detection algorithm that compares cloud top temperature versus the surface temperature. The satellite imagery is provided by the SSEC Data Center.
