At this distance your house is simply too small to be visible.

In order for this to work they have to be far away (at ~36'000 km altitude). The weather satellites need to take a picture of the entire world every 5 to 10 minutes. Why can I not see my house on the satellite image?

Low clouds, and especially fog, do sometimes have similar temperatures as the Earth’s surface and then become almost invisible to the satellite at night.Īs the infrared signal is much weaker than visible light, the resolution of satellite images is much less at night than during daytime. Therefore, cold clouds appear very bright while warm clouds are less visible. This thermal infrared measures the temperature of objects, and cold objects appear in a bright white. But unlike your digital camera, the satellite can also take pictures at night, using infrared radiation. Why are there some clouds missing at night?ĭuring daytime the satellite can take high resolution photos of the weather using the wavelengths of visible light. The global satellite image has the maximum possible resolution as provided by the satellites, yielding an incredible 500 megapixels for the entire world. The global satellite composite is generated from 5 different satellites (METEOSAT, GOES-16, GOES-17, HIMAWARI, METEOSAT-IODC) and processed into an Earth-colour image for better readability. The satellite animation is a great tool to understand weather development and movement of clouds, and is often used by meteorologists for short term weather forecasting. The images can be animated to produce a minute-by-minute satellite view of the weather. New satellite observations become available every 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the location.

Weather satellite images ( Belgium) show the cloud cover.

Live satellite camera view