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GOES CONUS imagery

noaa:goes-abi · Released · Included since usdata 0.8.

GOES-R ABI CONUS Cloud and Moisture Imagery.

At a glance

  • Files: NetCDF4
  • Selection: Whole single-channel CONUS scenes by inclusive UTC scan-start time
  • Required inputs: Satellite, channel, and both timestamps
  • Open locally: usdata[netcdf] · Reader guide
  • Examples: goes imagery

Usage and limitations

Available since v0.8 as noaa:goes-abi. The initial product is single-channel CONUS Cloud and Moisture Imagery, ABI-L2-CMIPC. Files are NetCDF4/HDF5 scenes from the anonymous noaa-goes16, noaa-goes17, noaa-goes18, and noaa-goes19 buckets. No AWS credentials or SDK are needed. Other ABI products and scan sectors remain unsupported.

Require satellite (16, 17, 18, or 19), channel (1–16, also C01–C16), and both timestamps. product defaults to ABI-L2-CMIPC and rejects any other value. Unknown parameters, text/geographic constraints, and variables are rejected: channels select distinct whole files; the server cannot crop these scenes or select variables within them. temporal_subset means selecting archived scans.

The adapter lists hourly ABI-L2-CMIPC/YYYY/DDD/HH/ prefixes, follows S3 continuation tokens, and selects scans whose start times fall in the inclusive UTC query interval. It does not select a scan that started before the interval merely because the scan overlaps it. Filename start/end stamps have tenths-of-a- second precision; asset metadata retains both bounds and the listed byte size. Naive dates/times mean UTC; a date-only end is midnight at the start of that day. Use a short interval to limit the number of whole-scene downloads.

For example, fetch one small shortwave-infrared scene (~255 kB):

uv run usdata fetch noaa:goes-abi \
  --start 2024-05-06T12:01:18.1Z --end 2024-05-06T12:01:18.1Z \
  -p satellite=18 -p channel=6

Channel 6 is reflected solar imagery and this example is mostly dark; it is chosen to keep the live fetch/restore check small. For thermal imagery, channel 13 scenes are roughly 4 MB in the verified sample. CMI represents reflectance for reflective bands or brightness temperature for infrared bands; consult the file's units and data-quality flags before analysis. The adapter preserves raw bytes and does not project, mask, or reinterpret imagery.

NOAA's product documentation identifies CMIP channels, scan modes, and satellite coverage. The NODD registry documents public cloud access. Satellite availability varies by date and outages; no East/West alias is inferred from a historical query. The catalog's start is the initial public GOES-16 date, not a claim that every satellite was operating then. Listing ABI-L2-CMIPC/2017/ with max-keys=1 confirmed the first scene at 2017-02-28T00:02:50.4Z. The bucket also has placeholder year-2000 test scenes; the adapter excludes these by limiting selection to the public observation era and rejecting intervals entirely before 2017-02-28.

See the service research notes for dated upstream probes.

All NOAA datasets.

Catalog reference.

Catalog reference

  • Availability: since 0.8
  • Domain: Weather satellites
  • Catalog date range: 2017-02-28 to open-ended
  • Coverage varies by station, product, and date; the range above does not guarantee observations.
  • Upstream documentation
  • License: US Government Work (public domain)
  • Transport: s3
  • Adapter: usdata.providers.noaa.goes:GoesAbi

All NOAA datasets.