Satellite Liaison Blog

A total solar eclipse took place across North America on 8 April 2024, and was visible from western Mexico, through the south-central and northeastern US, and into far eastern Canada. NOAA GOES and JPSS satellites captured imagery of the total eclipse from above. This blog post will share a variety of GOES ABI and JPSS VIIRS Imagery revealing unique views of the eclipse.

Starting off with Full Disk Imagery from GOES-18 (-West), visible imagery shows the eclipse appear out of the terminator well south of the equator, racing northeast across North America thereafter (Fig 1).

From the GOES-16 (-East) perspective, the eclipse emerges into the western part of the disk view just south of the equator around 1630 UTC and traverses northeast across North America and east into the terminator by 2000 UTC (Fig 2).

Focusing on the Contiguous United States (CONUS), the GOES-East CONUS sector provided a great view of the eclipse through the day at 5-minute intervals. Visible imagery shows totality entering south Texas by 1830 UTC, and exiting Maine about an hour later (Fig 3).

A similar view from the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB provides additional qualitative detail about the clouds across the path of totality, including low (liquid) clouds as cyan vs upper (ice) clouds as red (Fig 4).

Focusing on times shortly before, and shortly after, the passage of the eclipse over east Texas, it is obvious that the loss of solar heating during the short period of the eclipse resulted in a collapse of the cu field (Fig 5).

The NWS and NESDIS collaborated on a Mesoscale plan for the eclipse. GOES-East Meso-1 followed the path of totality, updating it’s position every 5-minutes, providing 1-min imagery of the eclipse totality progression across North America (Fig 6).

GOES-East Meso-2, and GOES-West Meso’s -1 and -2, were lined up along a portion of totality from Mexico through the Ohio River Valley (Fig 7).

One can overlay GOES-East Meso-1 onto GOES-East CONUS Imagery in order to follow the eclipse in 1-min intervals, while maintaining imagery outside of the Meso sector (Fig 8)

A similar animation can be made, but from a totality-relative perspective (Fig 9).

Focusing back on the clouds around Dallas, viewing 1-min Nighttime Microphysics RGB imagery captures the cloud field within totality as if it were nighttime. This imagery overlaid on the Day Cloud Phase Distinction RGB CONUS imagery (Fig 10) shows the rapid transition from daylight (and the daytime RGB imagery) and nighttime (and the nighttime RGB imagery).

The appearance of all 16 GOES-East ABI bands over Texas totality is shared in Fig 11.

Thunderstorms were already well underway over east Texas as the eclipse passed to the northwest, allowing for a unique view in GOES-West 1-min VIS/IR Sandwich Imagery (Fig 12).

While orbital paths of NOAA-21 and S-NPP did not align with the eclipse path of totality, that of NOAA-20 did, capturing the eclipse in the western half of the swath. VIIRS provides a unique ~overhead view of the eclipse at 375-m and 750-m spatial resolution. The 22 VIIRS bands are shown in Fig 13.

Additional NOAA-20 VIIRS RGB Imagery products are shown in Figs 14-16.

Additional satellite imagery of the eclipse can be found on the CIMSS Satellite Blog and the CIRA Satellite Library.

Bill Line, NOAA/NESDIS