INSTRUMENT 03 OF 5 . GEN 2Infrared / Visible Imaging
Infrared / Visible Imaging
It watches the storm move. By capturing the sky - where clouds are, how tall and cold their tops are, and which way they're drifting - infrared and visible imaging reveals winds from images taken minutes apart and shows thunderstorms forming as cloud tops cool and rise. The same imager can measure surface temperature and detect the heat signature of a wildfire.
Overview
The imager watches weather happen. Visible imagery maps cloud structure in daylight, while thermal infrared measures cloud-top and surface brightness temperature day and night. Comparing repeated frames reveals motion, derives cloud-top winds, and detects rapidly cooling cloud tops as storms grow.
- Measures
- Cloud-top + surface brightness temperature
- Derives
- Cloud motion winds
- Operates
- Infrared: day + night
The atmosphere's security camera
A wide, fast, continuous video of the sky. One still frame tells you where the storm is; play the frames back-to-back and you can see which way it's moving and how fast it's growing.
Across infrared and visible light, it reads the clouds — their shape, their height, how cold their tops are — plus the temperature of the ocean and land, and the hot signature of a fire and its smoke.
Track a feature, read the wind
The imager's most valuable product isn't always the picture — it's the motion in it. Track a cloud or water-vapor feature from one image to the next, and the distance it moved over the time is a wind: an atmospheric motion vector, or AMV.
Do it across a whole storm and you build a dense field of winds where radiosondes and aircraft can't reach — the ocean, the tropics, and the upper troposphere.
One camera, the sky’s motion
Everything you can read from the top of the weather — its winds, its growth, its heat — refreshed fast enough to watch it change
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Cloud imagery
Cloud mask, cloud-top temperature, cloud-top height, and phase (ice vs water)
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Atmospheric motion vectors (AMVs)
Winds tracked frame-to-frame - a key assimilated product
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Convective initiation & growth
Cloud-top cooling rates, overshooting tops - a storm being born.
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Sea- & land-surface temperature
Skin temperature over ocean and ground.
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Fire & hot-spot detection
Fire mask, temperature, area, radiative power - plus smoke.
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Water-vapor imagery
Upper-level moisture, used as a motion tracer.
A camera that measures the wind.
Track clouds from frame to frame, and rapid revisit turns imagery into atmospheric wind measurements that weather models can assimilate.
Watch the storm being born
A sounder tells you when the atmosphere is primed. The imager shows the moment convection takes off - clouds rising, cooling, and rapidly growing into a storm - it is the one instrument that watches weather happen.
Constellation Foundation
Infrared and Visible Imaging shows the weather taking shape - clouds forming, storms growing, and systems moving across the globe. The rest of the constellation fills in what lies beneath and around that picture: the atmosphere, the rain, and the surface below.
THE FIVE INSTRUMENTS ARE ANNOUNCED. SEE WHAT THEY ARE BUILT FOR.
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