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Weather satellites are our collective eyes on global and regional weather events. They send images every day and even several times per hour. Weather satellites are able to monitor storms and track their movements.
Generally speaking, there two types of weather satellites: geostationary operational environmental satellites for regular weather reporting and immediate warning; polar-orbiting satellites obtain more detailed pictures for longer-term weather prediction. Both types of satellite are essential components of the global weather monitoring system.
The Mekong Basin is served by a number of weather satellites, for example the Japanese GMS-5 satellite, the American NOAA/GOES satellites, the Chinese Fungyun (FY) satellites, and the Russian/Indian Electro satellite.
The weather satellites have two on-board imaging sensors: visible (VIS) and infrared (IR). Each sensor "sees" the same field of view; however, they differ in their sensitivity to various wavelengths of light. There is also a water vapor (WV) data product available from some meteorological service providers.
In addition to the provision of hourly and daily weather data products, weather satellite imagery is also used regularly in tropical storm warning bulletins. The documentation of past storms of the western pacific region includes multi-channel color composite imagery and animations of tropical cyclones.
http://www.npmoc.navy.mil/jtwc.html
http://www.osei.noaa.gov/Events/Tropical/W_Pacific/
The Meteorological Services Division of Singapore provides various weather information and forecasts in support of regional needs. This office also issues tropical cyclone information for the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. Among many other useful products, they produce for the ASEAN region hourly GOES-9 weather satellite imagery as well as frequent images from the Chinese Fungyun-1D (FY-1D) and the American NOAA satellites.
GOES-9 Infra-red Images web site at the Hong Kong Observatory
The meteorological office of the Hong Kong Observatory provides a range of weather satellite services for the region. They include real-time image products and up-to-date animations from the American GOES-9 satellite, the Chinese Fungyun-2B satellite, the NOAA and FY-1 satellites, and the European Meteosat-5 satellite.
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