STAR JPSS Website
January Image of the month - US East Coast Snow Storm
Bill Line
17 Feb 2026 - The late January winter storm that affected areas from Texas to New England featured an unusually large region of sleet and freezing rain. The VIIRS Snowbelt RGB image captured these differences well, distinguishing between the light, fluffy snow that dominated the northern part of the storm, and the ice and sleet on the southern periphery. The image shows the 26 Jan 2026 VIIRS Snowmelt RGB with NWS local storm reports (LSRs) overlaid, which shows how the RGB differentiates snow cover (lighter blues; white text) from ice cover (darker blues; yellow text) and sleet (medium blues; red text), following major winter storm, detailed in this blog post.
Kilauea erupts again
Bill Line
20 Apr 2026 - The main caldera of the Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii began erupting periodically in Fall 2025. On March 10, 2026 the 43rd of these eruptions occurred – featuring a 1000 ft high fountain of lava. The volcanic eruption produced a significant ash plume that led Hawai’i Volcanoes National Parkto temporarily close parts of the park and nearby Highway 11, as copious amounts of ash and tephra fell from the sky. The ash plume is clearly visible in the VIIRS Ash RGB. This event was detailed on a VISIT blog post. The image shows the VIIRS Ash RGB, which uses the 8.6 um (M14), 10.8 um (M15), and 12.0 um (M16) spectral channels, while exhibiting a 750-m spatial resolution.
March Image of the Month - Alaska Sea Spray
Bill Line
20 Apr 2026 - On March 9, 2026, a strong blocking ridge over the western Aleutians and deep northerly flow drove a bitterly cold airmass into southwestern Alaska, resulting in widespread, extreme freezing spray. The NWS in Anchorage issued Heavy Freezing Spray Warnings for the region, citing 45-knot winds, 10-foot seas, and rapid vessel ice accumulation rates of up to 4 cm per hour, alongside Cold Weather Advisories for wind chills dropping to 10 below zero.
Forecasters utilized a combination of satellite imagery and in-situ observations to track and verify the event. The GOES-West and VIIRS Sea Spray RGB products (shown in figure) successfully detected the spray in clear-sky coastal waters as a distinct milky cyan-gray signature. Using these tools in tandem provided optimal results: GOES-West offered continuous temporal tracking of the event's evolution, while the higher-resolution VIIRS imagery delivered detailed diagnostic views of the spray's texture and extent at high latitudes. More can be found at the Satellite Liaison Blog
April Image of the Month - SpaceX Rocket Launch
Bill Line
10 June 2026 - On April 21, SpaceX successfully launched the Bandwagon-3 rideshare mission, utilizing a Falcon 9 rocket to deliver a diverse cluster of small commercial and research satellites into a mid-inclination orbit. As the rocket ascended into space, its exhaust plume was captured from by the VIIRS DNB, an instrument sensitive to faint visible and near-infrared light at night. This striking low-light imagery not only demonstrates the remarkable tracking capabilities of the DNB sensor but also provides atmospheric scientists with valuable spatial data on high-altitude exhaust signatures and the physical dynamics of the launch environment.
June Highlight - Super Typhoon Bavi
Flavio Itrubide-Sanchez
16 July 2026 - Typhoon Bavi formed in the Western Tropical Pacific Ocean in late June 2026 and was upgraded to a Category-5 equivalent Super Typhoon in early July by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). As the storm crossed near the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam on July 6, the National Weather Service reported that sustained winds near Bavi’s eyewall reached 180 mph. Spaceborne sensors such as ATMS and CrIS are crucial for the prediction and monitoring of extreme weather events like Bavi, particularly in areas like the tropical Pacific Ocean where in situ observations are scarce. The figure shows NOAA-20 ATMS Channel 22 imagery (ascending and descending passes) on July 7.
S-NPP CrIS End of Operational Use - 11 February 2026 - The S-NPP CrIS instrument experienced a single event upset on December 23, 2025 at 11:36:40 UTC which rendered the Scene Selection Module (SSM) inoperable. After repeated attempts to recover the SSM, engineers were unable to restore the S-NPP CrIS instrument to an operational state. To date, the SSM remains in an anomalous state. Given that the S-NPP CrIS instrument is operating well beyond its Design Life, and is tertiary within the JPSS Constellation and has no assigned performance or latency Requirements, the Director of the NESDIS Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO) has approved the recommendation to suspend recovery efforts. This decision permanently ends the operational use of the S-NPP CrIS Instrument.
VIIRS Global Annual Surface Type (AST) - 25 September 2025 - The VIIRS Annual Surface Type 2023 product (AST-2023, spatial resolution: 1 km) based on 2024 whole year surface reflectance data is ready for users to download at STAR FTP sites.
NetCDF version / Zip files:- VIIRS-AST-EMC20-GEO
NetCDF / Zip file - VIIRS-AST-IGBP17-GEO
NetCDF - Zip file - VIIRS-AST-IGBP17-SIN
NetCDF - Zip file
Each Zip file contains a *.bin, a *.hdr and a *readme.pdf file. For more information please contact Xiwu Zhan.
JPSS data now available in the cloud - 17 April 2024
JPSS operational data products, training materials, tools, sample
python scripts to read the data are accessible from NOAA Open Data
Dissemination (NODD).
STAR JPSS Monthly Reports
- April 2026, (PDF, 14.12 MB)
- March 2026, (PDF, 19.3 MB)
- February 2026, (PDF, 16.03 MB)
- January 2026, (PDF, 16.65 MB)
- December 2025, (PDF, 15.41 MB)
- November 2025, (PDF, 14.88 MB)
- Report Archive
For more information, please write to Ingrid Guch / Lihang Zhou