What are the colors in satellite cloud images and what do they represent?
In satellite cloud images, green represents land. Seeing green means the weather is sunny. Blue represents the ocean, and seeing blue means the weather is sunny. White indicates rainy areas, and the whiter the color, the thicker the clouds. The brighter the white, the more obvious the precipitation, and the darker the white, the more overcast.
If the surface of the earth is a clear sky area, what the satellite observes is the infrared radiation information sent from the ground to space, which appears as black and gray; the darker the black, the stronger the ground radiation and the clearer the weather. The transition area between the clear sky area and the cloud and rain area is a dark gray, gray, and light gray cloud system, indicating that there are clouds of different thicknesses without obvious precipitation.
Application of satellite cloud images
Satellite cloud images can be used to identify different weather systems, determine their locations, estimate their intensity and development trends, and provide a basis for weather analysis and weather forecasting. Through the characteristics of morphology, structure, brightness and texture of satellite cloud images, cloud species, genus and precipitation conditions can be identified. It can identify a wide range of cloud systems, such as spirals, ribbons, commas, waves, cells, etc., and can be used to infer the location and characteristics of large-scale weather systems such as fronts, extratropical cyclones, tropical storms, and high-altitude jet streams.
Infer the locations of anticyclones and high-altitude high-pressure ridges based on areas of clear skies. It can also identify local severe storms, such as thunderstorms, squall lines and other small and medium-scale weather systems. If the satellite is instructed to increase the number of detections (for example, once every 30 minutes), it can monitor the activities of local severe storms to produce real-time weather forecasts and warnings. .
For vast oceans, plateaus, deserts and polar regions with few weather stations, satellite cloud images are very precious detection data, which play an important role in improving forecast accuracy. In areas with dense meteorological stations, the images provided are also more complete and systematic, which cannot be replaced by other observation methods.