Finding Earth Imagery

Many images collected by earth-observing satellites are made available to the public free of charge. You may find the following data sources useful:

• NOAA CoastWatch Program

• NRCan Earth Sciences

• NOAA CLASS Archive

• GOES data from NOAA

• GOES data from NASA

• Natural Earth

• ESRI Open Data

• National Data Buoy Center (NDBC)

• National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC)

• National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) Satellite Data Access

• NASA Rapid Response

• NASA Earth Observatory

• Global Change Master Directory

• CelesTrak satellite tracking data

• NASA Ocean Color Web

• NOAA Ocean Products

Data Formats and Software

Some imagery is available as GIF, JPEG, and PNG for viewing in a web browser, while others are stored in scientific data formats such as HDF or NetCDF and require special viewing software. Imagery in cloud-optimized GeoTIFF is used on Google Earth Engine and for import into GIS software. Some useful links are below:

• GeoTIFF Specification

• NOAA Polar Orbiter Data User's Guides

• Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) Group

• HDF-EOS Tools

• Network Common Data Form (netCDF)

• NetCDF CF Metadata Conventions

• NASA SeaDAS

• ESA SNAP common architecture

• HDFView

• The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT)

• MapServer

• WXtoIMG APT processing

• PyTROLL project

• NASA Panoply