Happy #FullDiskFriday! As we head into the weekend, we want to take a moment to step back, 22,240 miles to be exact, and appreciate our amazing planet.
Each Friday we feature one of the many full disk Earth images captured by environmental satellites. This week, our image comes to us from the Japan Meteorological Agency's Himawari-8 satellite. This water vapor image, which was taken today, April 29, 2016, at 2:00pm EDT, shows the moisture content in the atmosphere over the entire Eastern Hemisphere. The bright and colored areas indicate high water vapor (moisture) content and/or ice crystals, while black and brown areas indicate little or no moisture present. Water vapor imagery is useful for both determining locations of moisture and atmospheric circulations.
The Himawari-8 satellite is the first unit of the Japan Meteorological Agency's third generation of geostationary satellites. The satellite provides visible light and infrared images of the Asia-Pacific region and its data are vital for global geostationary coverage. What's more, because it carries similar advanced imagers, Himawari-8 gives us a preview of what we can expect from NOAA's GOES-R satellite after it launches later this year.
To see more real-time full disk imagery, visithttp://go.usa.gov/cu5jk
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