STAR JPSS Website
OMPS captures Canadian wildfire smoke
Banghua Yan
17 Jul 2025 - The NOAA-21 OMPS Nadir Mapper monitors atmospheric ozone and detects UV-absorbing aerosols and trace gases relevant to air quality, with improved spatial resolution. A machine learning algorithm was developed to visually observe aerosol radiometric features of large wildfires using OMPS NM SDR data above 310 nm, with VIIRS AOD as a reference. Two Canadian wildfires merged and grew to over 240,000 hectares by 27 May 2025, remaining active into June and causing hazardous air quality and evacuations.
The figure shows aerosol features from 27 May to 9 June using NOAA-21 OMPS NM data (10×12 km² at nadir). High values indicate dense smoke aerosols. These results demonstrate NOAA-21’s improved resolution—about 7× finer than NOAA-20—and strong. calibration accuracy.
VIIRS true color imagery complements OMPS data. Overlaying OMPS aerosol features onto VIIRS imagery provides clear, contextual views of wildfire impacts often missed in visible light.
JPSS Surveys LA Wildfires
Tom Atkins
10 Mar 2025 - The combination of a wet 2023 and a very dry fall and winter in 2024 set the stage for explosive wildfires in the Los Angeles area starting on January 7, 2025. Several large wildfires broke out in the Los Angeles metro area destroying nearly 20,000 homes and displacing several hundred thousand residents.These fires were captured by VIIRS as shown in the figure above (from JSTAR Mapper).
GCOM-W1 AMSR2 Retrievals Observe Severe Weather Outbreak over the Chesapeake Bay region
Ken Pryor
10 Apr 2025 - Linear convective storms producing hazardous winds impacted the greater DC area and Chesapeake Bay region on March 5, 2025. Retrievals and image products derived from the GCOM-W1 AMSR2 89 GHz channel detected narrow rain bands that generated severe winds before a cold front passage. Comparison of the polarization-corrected temperature (“PCT”) as calculated from the high-resolution (5 km) 89 GHz channel to the derived microwave (“f”) index that is more sensitive to scattering by large ice particles (i.e., graupel, hail) revealed important microphysical characteristics distinguishing between low and high downburst (thunderstorm-generated straight-line wind) potential. The figure shows the lower PCT and higher microwave index values associated with a rain band that produced a wind gust of 56 knots (64 mph), shortly after 1900 UTC, at Thomas Point Lighthouse in the middle Chesapeake Bay.
VIIRS records several severe weather events in southern Great Plains
Bill Line
29 Apr 2025 - Mid-March was very active in the southern Great Plains region – with a large outbreak of wildfires, blowing dust, and severe thunderstorms. The Bill Line’s Satellite Liaison blog detailed these events in a series of posts showing how VIIRS can be used to forecasters to aid in forecasting these events.
https://satelliteliaisonblog.wordpress.com/2025/03/18/mid-march-2025-active-us-weather-wildfires/
https://satelliteliaisonblog.wordpress.com/2025/03/17/mid-march-2025-active-us-weather-dust/
https://satelliteliaisonblog.wordpress.com/2025/03/19/mid-march-2025-active-us-weather-severe-thunderstorms/
VIIRS captures Ohio River Valley flooding
Jerry Zhan
8 Jul 2025 - Bill Line published a blog post titled “Early April 2025 MS/OH River Valley Flooding”. The post features GOES and VIIRS imagery of the persistent thunderstorms that led to widespread flooding, as well as post event imagery capturing the extent of the flooding. It also highlights examples of how NWS/WPC incorporated satellite imagery into their forecasts.
VIIRS Day Land Cloud RGB Imagery from 1 April 2025 (top) and 7 April 2025 (bottom). Bodies of water appear as dark blue in the imagery. The image on the right shows flooded croplands in the Mississippi Delta, particularly across eastern Arkansas and southeast Missouri, and the swollen surrounding rivers.
Surface Type team analysis of 2025 North American Snow Melt Timing
Jerry Zhan
8 Jul 2025 - The surface type team continues to produce the monthly water product suite, which include estimates of water surface fraction (WSF), snow cover, ice cover, and the fraction of land area not covered by any of the three H2O forms (non-H2O land fraction) for each month. An analysis of the monthly snow cover fraction data of this product suite from March to May shows that the geographic patterns of spring snow cover retreat cut across latitudinal gradients over central North America
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).
VIIRS Global Annual Surface Type (AST) - 31 August 2024 - The VIIRS Annual Surface Type 2023 product (AST-2023, spatial resolution: 1 km) based on 2023 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.
STAR JPSS Monthly Reports
- May 2025, (PDF, 11.32 MB)
- April 2025, (PDF, 9.75 MB)
- March 2025, (PDF, 10 MB)
- February 2025, (PDF, 10.72 MB)
- January 2025, (PDF, 9.94 MB)
- December 2024, (PDF, 11.29 MB)
- Report Archive
For more information, please write to Ingrid Guch / Lihang Zhou