Looking from the top down and bottom up.

Visible GOES 16 Image courtesy of NOAA

My favorite satellite images are visible images. A visible image is created using the visible light spectrum so we see what someone looking down on the Earth from space would see. (OK…it’s a lot more complicated than that but for our purposes I will leave it at that.)

Visible images show us Earth’s land forms; bodies of water, clouds, forests, grasslands, and more. This image above was created at 10:16 a.m. CST (16:16Z) this morning. Lakes, rivers, forests, snow cover, and clouds are all visible. Lakes with open water are dark while ice covered lakes are white. Rivers are dark, either due to water and/or trees lining the river valleys. Dense clouds obscure land forms and thin clouds allow land forms to show through. If this image were put in motion the clouds would become immediately apparent; they would move while land forms were remain stationary. Go to the satellite image section on our home page and you will find images like the one above that you can put in motion. Look for the GOES 16 and 17 images.

There are high clouds over northeastern Iowa in the above image. A thin sliver of clouds extends south to the Iowa River Valley in east central Iowa. Under that sliver of clouds is Cedar Falls, Iowa. The two pictures below were taken at 11:33 a.m. CST under those clouds shortly after the dense part of the clouds moved east of Cedar Falls.

Photo Copyright 2020 by Craig Johnson looking SSW.

Photo Copyright by Craig Johnson looking NW

These are good examples of dense (top photo) and broken cirrus. When looking at the satellite image above, the broken area of clouds that are slightly west of the main cloud area protruding south into northeast Iowa had moved over Cedar Falls when these photos were taken. It is that broken patch of clouds that shows in these pictures. You need to look very close at the cloud detail to see it. You are looking for a very tiny patch of broken clouds that look like waves.