🛰️ Satellite

Every GOES-19 ABI band — water vapor (high/mid/low + GINI full-disk), IR, all visible bands, fire, ozone, CO2 — plus NOAA STAR quick-look products.
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GOES-19 ABI decoded from NOAA open data and rendered locally; the NOAA STAR group mirrors STAR's ready-to-view products (5-min cadence). Visible bands go dark at night - that is the satellite, not the site. Full-disk water vapor takes a couple of minutes to render the first time.

🍂 Fall color tracker - when the mountains turn

NDVI snapshot-
Compare toSep 1 baseline
Seasonpeaking up top first
Under cursorhover the map
dense green starting to turn peak color past peak NDVI: plant vigor declines as chlorophyll fades - the color wave, measured by satellite
Vegetation index (NDVI) from MODIS-Terra via NASA's open GIBS service - where photosynthesis is fading, color is coming. The foliage index layer shows the measured signal (dark green = still growing; gold/orange/brown = color change underway); true color is what the satellite actually photographed, clouds permitting. Sweep runs Sep 1 through late October - future composites stay empty until the satellite paints them; the latest date with real tiles is the honest "now".
Peak-color ladder - typical weeks per elevation band (East TN / high country): color starts on the highest peaks and falls downslope roughly 1,000 ft a week, so each band gets its moment. The band(s) inside their typical window today are highlighted.
Windows after the classic Grandfather Mountain / Blue Ridge high-country guides (Howie Neufeld's week-by-week elevation ladder), clipped to East Tennessee landmarks - a compass, not a clock: any band can swing a week either way with the year's weather. Pair with the satellite layers above and the weekly reports to see where the wave actually is.

🪞 Same scene, two lenses - raw band vs STAR product

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raw ABI
STAR
Left: the raw ABI band, decoded locally from NOAA open data - exactly what the sensor measured. Right: NOAA STAR's ready-made product built from the same feed. Frames pair by valid time (labels show the offset when the two sides have no exact shared minute); pan or zoom either map and the other follows. If the raw band's structure shows up honestly in the product, the product earns your trust - that is the whole point of this card.

📖 Reading the bands - which layer for what

Water vapor (high / mid / low) - moisture at three heights of the atmosphere. Swirls here are the storms of tomorrow: a plume pulling in from the Gulf or a dry slot boring into the Tennessee Valley shows up hours before clouds form. The GINI full-disk style is the classic weather-broadcast look.

Infrared (10.3 / 11.2 / dirty 12.3) - cloud-top temperature, day and night. Colder = higher = stronger convection; the dirty-IR split with 11.2 helps separate low clouds from fog.

Visible bands (day only) - red visible is the crisp daytime picture; blue and near-IR (veggie) see haze and vegetation; cirrus picks out thin high cloud the others miss; snow/ice makes winter surfaces pop; cloud particle size distinguishes water droplets from ice.

Shortwave IR (fire/hot spots) - glows at wildfire lines and industrial heat day or night; CO2 / cloud top height helps gauge how deep storms reach.

NOAA STAR quick-look - pre-built band combinations from NOAA's STAR program, one per row in the table below.
Product What you are looking at Reach for it when…
GeoColor True-color by day (natural vegetation, rivers, terrain), city lights and moonlit cloud by night. Sharing the big picture - storms, river fog, smoke, snow cover - with someone who does not read satellite imagery. The default first look, day or night.
Water Vapor (3 layers) Moisture at three heights: mid and low layers track where rain-producing moisture actually sits, not just the pretty high-altitude swirls. The classic full-disk swirl looks impressive but nothing is reaching the ground - check mid/low to see if the moisture column connects to your weather.
Infrared Cloud-top temperature in a clean NWS-style palette, day and night. Judging storm strength at night or in winter - the coldest tops here are the same signal as the raw 10.3 μm band, just readable at a glance.
Red Visible (day) What your eye would see from orbit - 500 m red-band visible, crisp and natural. Daytime detail work: fog banks in valleys, cumulus streets, snow on the Plateau, shelf clouds. Useless after dark.
Air Mass Air-mass boundaries from red/green/blue channel ratios: warm-moist greens, cold-dry blues, stratospheric intrusion reds. Chasing jet-stream dynamics and troughs days out - a dark-red dry slot boring into the ridge is a severe-weather ingredient arriving early.
Sandwich Visible underneath with coldest IR tops overlaid in color, so texture and strength share one image. Convection at its most readable: you see the storm's texture and which cell owns the coldest, strongest tops without flipping layers.
Fire Temperature Shortwave-IR tuned so fire lines and industrial heat glow white-hot against cool terrain. Wildfire monitoring day or night - the hottest pixels are the active head of the fire, and the glow cuts through smoke where visible fails.
Dust Daytime dust and ash split out in pink by the same band math that separates it from cloud. Saharan outbreaks and local blowing dust - also useful for faint plumes that look like nothing in GeoColor until they are on top of you.
These are STAR's ready-made composites - same GOES-19 feed the raw bands above are decoded from, just pre-combined and pre-colored by the scientists at NOAA/NESDIS STAR. The pair in the compare card (raw band + STAR product) is the sanity check: when the raw band shows the same structure, the product is telling the truth. Cadence and coverage match the quick-look picker (5-minute updates, 1-hour loops).