(Video) 10 years of US weather patterns in 3 minutes

Pretty cool in my opinion.

The GOES-12 weather satellite went up ten years ago and was decommissioned recently. Someone took a pic from each day it was up and made it into this cool vid so we can see the weather patterns over the US over time.

The Most Breathtaking Video of the Weather You’ll Watch This Week

Last Monday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a video of the past 10 years of weather in the Americas. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite GOES-12, which had monitored the weather in North and South America since April 2003, was retired on August 16. This video shows one photo a day from the time the satellite was operating.

187 seconds. 3641 images.

The hurricanes stood out to me the most. Hurricane Katrina at the 0:45 mark looks no different from several storms before and after it. Hurricane Ike, which knocked out my power for five days and caused $30 billion of damage in the US and $7 billion in Cuba, is almost undetectable. It must be around the 1:40 mark, but the storm that covered the Gulf of Mexico in pictures on the Weather Channel comes and goes too quickly for me to pinpoint it for sure. Hurricane Sandy is fresh in our minds, and you can see it pretty clearly at the 2:50 mark in the video, but it too forms and dissipates in the blink of an eye.

The NOAA video seems to highlight a tension between the unpredictability of the weather and its repetitiveness. Every summer, the west coast of Africa seems to “pitch” hurricanes to the Caribbean. Sometimes the Yucatan or Caribbean islands bat them into the north Atlantic, and sometimes they come right over the plate to the shores of the Gulf States.

Scientific American

The thing that stood out for me is the steady stream of storms that go up the East coast, eventually hitting my town of Philly. It just goes to show why the weather is so damn unpredictable around here. The hurricanes come and go in the blink of an eye and you can't really tell the major ones from the minor ones when looking on them from this scale.

That is cool, thanks for posting it.

I was watching South America. On the whole, their weather seems much more stable and predictable than ours in North America.

reply to post by butcherguy


I think its pretty cool how the same weather patterns seem to repeat over and over across the US but, there's still this undeniable sense of chaos about the whole thing.

It makes me wonder how on Earth anyone can claim to make predictions about the weather with any degree of certainty.

Just giving this thread a *bump* for anyone who might have missed it this morning.