Database of daily satellite photos

Here's site with very high resolution satellite photos which are excellent for checking things like cloud cover and thunderstorms.
It's just better to have real broadband connection because 250 meters/pixel resolution photos are very big, much over 5MB per photo.

rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov...
After you select day site gives page with lot of thumbnails.
Now use orbit track maps to see times when satellites where above area you want to see.
After that search those times among thumbnails and you'll find high resolution photos.

Red "dots" mean thermal anomalies, places where sensors detected higher temperatures. (like big fires, volcanoes...)
And if left side frame has images with acronym LST those show temperature of radiating/visible surface, which makes LST photos very good for detecting thunderstorms whose tops are high in the troposphere where temperatures are much colder than at level of normal clouds.


Also wide area clouds and cloud formations can be very nice looking
rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov.../crefl1_143.A2002186183000-2002186183500.1km.jpg



And here's last summer's best thunderstorm I saw.
rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov.../crefl2_143.A2005165104500-2005165105000.2km.jpg
Should be quite easy to recognise which are Cumulonimbus clouds when you look lower part of photo.

And if you look highest resolution photos you can actually see quite much details from clouds...
Like that second widest Cumulonimbus in that group which has something which looks like very wide area overshooting top.
(overshooting top means that updraft was strong enough to penetrate tropopause and rise into the stratosphere)

If you wonder were I was that place was directly under thunderstorm's "core" where downpour was strongest with some hails and downburst caused very strong wind gust. (after storm's inflow first caused wind to other direction)


Now if I just could find photos of this area from 26th of June 2000 around 12-15UTC.
In that day thunderstorm just dropped some two inch ice bricks little over 10 kilometers from here.

Thank you for the info E_T, it was very informative.