This is a 12-month animation of color-enhanced images from NOAA’s GOES East geostationary weather satellite. It covers all of 2009 except for brief periods when my internet connection or my computer were down. The date and time of each image is at the upper left, if it survives YouTube’s reencoding of the video. This is a bit long, but here it is for the record:
This video is made from infrared images, which measure heat radiation, so what you see here is basically temperature. The color is artificial (obviously!) and is used to enhance the contrast between different temperatures. The temperature is significant because severe weather is usually associated with convective systems which generate tall clouds, and the tops of tall clouds are colder than the tops of low clouds. But that daily pulsing you see isn’t necessarily clouds, as discussed below.
Note that the credits at the end of the video have an error in the URL of the original images, which should be http://www.goes.noaa.gov/GIFS/ECI7.JPG.
