NOAA PSW Satellite

The instrument

Satellite

GOES-18 (GOES-West)

Orbit

Geostationary, 137.0°W, 22,236 mi

Sector

PSW — Pacific Southwest

Cadence

A new frame every 5 minutes

Product

GeoColor composite

Loop

10 frames

What you are looking at

GeoColor is not one channel. By day it blends the blue, red and “veggie” bands into an approximation of what the eye would see from orbit. After dark it switches to the shortwave and longwave infrared bands, colorized so that blue is liquid-water cloud — fog and stratus — and gray to white is high ice cloud, with city lights from a polar orbiter laid underneath.

Frame times on the scrubber are Pacific, converted from the UTC stamp in NOAA’s own filename — which is exactly the time printed into the frame.