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Remote Sensing Data (All links will open in a new window)
| Geostationary Satellites | Current GOES images & animations, from LA-Oxnard Office NOAA's GOES satellites are most frequently used for monitoring current weather, because they can provide new images every 15 to 30 minutes, and this website displays recent animated loops of these images to show movements of clouds and weather systems. This link defaults to images of Southern California from the GOES-11 satellite, but other areas are also available. GOES includes a channel in the visible (centered at ~650 nm), and several infrared channels that can show approximate cloud-top temperatures, water vapor concentrations, and other meteorological variables. See Ellrod et al. (1998) to learn more. |
| GOES nighttime fog-product loop from NOAA/NESDIS This animation shows the previous night's clouds over the southwestern United States, distinguishing between high clouds (blue areas in the map) and low clouds/fog (yellow areas in the map). The numbers on this animation are the estimated visibilities, in statute miles, from surface weather stations, and standard meteorological symbols denote fog/mist/haze conditions. See Ellrod (1995) to learn more. |
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| Non-Geostationary Satellites | Daily true-color MODIS images centered on UCSB This site archives daytime images of Southern California and surrounding areas, at a 250-meter nominal resolution, with an archive going back a month or longer, and two images per day. Recent images from the MODIS sensors on Terra and Aqua (both of which are polar-orbiting satellites) are added to this site every day, sometimes only a few hours after they are aquired. Daily MODIS images from many other areas are available here. |
| Maps of current sea-surface temperatures from terrafin.com Generated using data from NOAA polar-orbiting satellites, available for Southern California and other areas. |
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| Sub-Orbital Aircraft | CaliforniaCoastline.org Oblique aerial photographs of California's coastline from low-altitude, primarily from a hand-held digital camera and a two-person team in a helicopter flown along California's coastline at around 150 to 2000 feet above sea-level. |
| AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer) An extremely high-performance hyperspectral sensor, AVIRIS has 224 contiguous spectral channels ranging from approximately 400 nm to 2500 nm at 10 nm intervals, and is flown on sub-orbital aircraft at varying altitudes (and thus spatial resolutions vary, but are typically around 4 to 20 meters). A few free sample datasets are available at this website, but most AVIRIS data are not available for free. See Green et al. (1998) to learn more. |
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| Surface Radar & Lightning Networks | Vandenberg (KVBX) doppler weather radar Ground-based weather radar installations like these can provide maps of estimated precipitation types and amounts, along with small-scale relative wind velocities within storms, which can help in identifying conditions that can spawn tornadoes. These images can be updated every few minutes, and animated to show storm movements, which can help in making short-term weather forecasts. This link points to the radar station at Vandenberg Air Force Base, which covers the UCSB area, but many other doppler radar installations exist, and cover most of the United States. See Crum et al. (1998) to learn more. |
| Vaisala - Free Lightning Explorer Map of recent lightning-flash locations in the contiguous United States, as detected by a ground-based sensor network. |
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| Worldwide lightning with animated geostationary satellite images Recent lighnting-flash detections from ground-based stations in the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN) displayed on top of animated loops of cloud coverage from GOES and other geostationary satellites. |
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| Webcams | UCSB's Campus Point webcam Real-time streaming video of UCSB's campus beach, looking south from near campus point (which is also called Goleta point). |
| Diablo Peak webcam, on Santa Cruz Island, updated every 10 minutes or so Real-time and archived images from the last several years showing the view in multiple directions from the top of Picacho Diablo, which, at approximately 754 meters, is the highest point in California's Channel Islands. |
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| TundraCam, user controllable in real-time, from Niwot Ridge, Colorado This camera is located at approximately 3528 meters (11,600 feet) above sea level, and you can control its pan, tilt, and zoom in real-time from this website. |
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| Dataset-Ordering Websites | USGS Seamless Data Distribution System High-resolution DEMs, orthoimages, land-cover data, and images from a variety of sensors, many with global coverage, are available for free download from this site. |
| NASA's EOS Data Gateway and NASA's LAADSweb These websites allow you to order full datasets from many NASA sensors. Some of these datasets are free (such as MODIS products) but some of them are not (such as ASTER products), and most of them require knowledge of tools like ENVI or ArcGIS to use them effectively. You can also download ASTER datasets for free from the LP-DAAC DataPool, but this generally only contains images from the United States acquired in the last two years (whereas the EOS Data Gateway has the full global ASTER archive going back to early 2000 or so). |
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| CLASS.noaa.gov (Archived DMSP, GOES, RADARSAT, and other sensors) Registration for this site is free, and you can order many of its data products for free, including a multi-year archive of GOES images. |
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| GloVis.USGS.gov (Landsat, EO-1, ASTER, aerial photos) Some Landsat scenes are available for free from this site, such as from its "Landsat decadal" and "Landsat science" collections, but most Landsat datasets aren't free. |
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| Astronaut Photography of the Earth, from jsc.nasa.gov Free images, many at rather high resolutions, most from hand-held film and digital cameras from NASA missions. |
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| Other Remote Sensing Links | NASA's Earth Observatory, image of the day Each day features a new image from any of a wide variety of sensors and geographic themes, with written descriptions and annotations; images from the past are saved in an archive spanning several years. |
| NOAA's sunrise, sunset, and solar position calculator This calculates the more-or-less exact times of sunrise, local solar noon, and sunset, for anywhere on Earth, on any day. It also provides solar zenith angles and other information, and can use formulas that take atmospheric refraction into account in creating these estimates. |
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| J-Track animated map showing current positions of some satellites This map updates itself in near real-time, and shows current ground tracks and sub-satellite points for several spacecraft used in remote sensing, along with current areas of daylight and darkness, and the subsolar point (the point on Earth's surface from which the sun is directly overhead). Here's a very awesome interactive 3-d version |
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| Predicted and archived overpass times and angles for spacecraft This should work for any latitude/longitude, and for almost any object orbiting the Earth if you know its assigned NORAD number (this website has pre-entered NORAD numbers for some NASA satellites). Also see these maps of ground tracks for some polar-orbiting satellites. |
Atmosphere & Ocean Data:
Also see the remote sensing category. (All links will open in a new window).
| Weather Forecasts | Map of current NWS weather forecast for Southern California This displays maps showing the National Weather Service (NWS) forecasts of basic meteorological variables like surface air temperatures, precipitation, winds, and relative humidities, with buttons to view maps for forecasts up to several days into the future. These maps cover the entire United States, but this link defaults to a view that's zoomed-in on Southern California. |
| Text describing the current NWS weather forecast for the Santa Barbara area This is the classic NWS text weather forecast product for the city of Santa Barbara. |
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| Table showing the current NWS weather forecast for UCSB This displays an experimental NWS digital weather forecast product in a table, for a location that can be specified by the user. The link is set to display the forecast for Isla Vista, a community immediately to the west of UCSB. |
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| Discussion of current NWS weather forecast for Southern California Operational forecasters update these discussions several times each day, which summarize the current local weather and the decision-making process that led them to issue the current NWS forecasts for the area. These discussions are issued from other NWS forecast offices as well, but this link goes to the Los-Angeles/Oxnard office, which handles forecasts for the UCSB area. |
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| Past & present hurricane tracks and forecasts, from Unisys This maps current locations of all active tropical storms worldwide, and their projected paths, along with archives of storms from the last several years. |
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| Weather Maps & Charts | Current synoptic weather chart on top of GOES infrared Colors in this map are estimated temperatures from the GOES satellites, which show locations of clouds and their heights (colder cloud tops are likely to be taller clouds), and surface skin temperatures. Yellow lines are isobars (areas of constant air pressure) adjusted to sea-level, and turquoise numbers are estimated air pressures, in millibars, in the centers of low and high pressure areas (labeled with the letters L and H, respectively). |
| Java map of current METARs from surface weather stations in North America Left click in this Java map to draw a zoom-in rectangle, and use the checkboxes below the map to view different numbers of stations and variables. See the legend on this page for descriptions of symbols used in the map. Variables displayed include air temperature, dewpoint, weather, winds, ceiling height and visibility. Also see this non-Java version. |
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| MesoWest customizable maps of surface station data This displays data from RAWS, NWS, and other stations on a map, with options for overlays of estimated precipitation and other variables. |
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| Numerical Weather Models | Recent numerical weather forecast model outputs from NCEP Weather forecasters base much of their decisions on output from these and other weather forecasting computer models, which use data from weather stations, radiosondes, and other sources, along with the laws of physics and parameterizations of atmospheric processes, to simulate upcoming weather. Predictive skill decreases dramatically for forecasts of the weather more than a few days in advance. |
| Recent numerical weather forecast model outputs from Unisys These are similar to the outputs from the link above, but with a different interface. |
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| UCSB's MM5 weather forecast model outputs This is a mesoscale weather forecasting model run at UCSB, which takes output from the larger-scale NAM (North American Model), but performs calculations at a finer spatial resolution that can simulate smaller scale processes more precisely, especially processes that are influenced strongly by small-scale topography. See Grell et al. (1994) to learn more. |
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| Model Output Statistics (MOS) - Explanations and data products MOS products adjust numerical weather forecast model outputs for specific locations, based upon statistical relationships between model performance in similar situations in the past with the actual weather observed at those locations. Thus, MOS attempts to account for situations in which numerical models habitually over- or under-predict weather variables (such as rainfall amounts) for certain locations, which happens often. Operational weather forecasters often use MOS to guide their decisions about what to put in their forecasts. |
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| Surface & Upper-Air Stations | Observed Precipitation Maps (past 1-, 6-, and 24-hours) Near real-time rainfall amounts from around California, mostly from tipping-bucket rain gages, are displayed on maps at this website. These are generally more reliable than radar estimates for measuring actual rainfall amounts. Watch this during storms! |
| Current weather station data (METARs). Santa Barbara is "KSBA" The weather station at KSBA makes a new observation each hour, and these are available from this website in near real-time. |
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| Current and archived radiosonde soundings (vertical atmospheric profiles) Radiosondes are basically weather balloons that provide vertical profiles of temperature, humidity, winds, and other meteorological variables throughout the troposphere and often up into the lower stratosphere. Radiosondes are generally launched twice per day (at 00:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC) from hundreds of locations worldwide, and this website provides a map of radiosonde launching stations in North America, along with their recent and archived data in tables and graphs. |
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| Coal Oil Point weather station from NOAA's USCRN This station is one of many in NOAA's United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN), which are all held to very high standards of instrument quality and data quality control, and it's located at Coal Oil Point, near our COPR station. The station measures air temperature, precipitation, wind, solar radiation, and surface skin temperature. |
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| "Two-way" diurnal/seasonal station climatology plots for Santa Barbara and vicinity These graphs show average values of meteorological variables like air temperature and relative humidity for several surface stations in the Santa Barbara area, with one axis showing seasonal patterns (by month) and the other axis showing diurnal patterns (by time of day). |
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| Hourly data from many stations from the NCDC global archive Most stations in this archive are airports, and the archive is quite comprehensive. Most data from this archive should be free if you're on campus or using UCSB's proxy server. |
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| NCDC archive data for stations in the United States Similar to the link above, but generally only allows you to download one month of data at a time, and only for the United States, although it does have some features not available from the link above. |
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| Local Climatology - Daily, monthly, records, from weather.gov This National Weather Service page shows long-term averages from Santa-Barbara-area surface stations for various meteorological variables, like rainfall and air temperatures, and comparisons from recent daily or yearly observations to these long-term values. |
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| Large-Scale Climate | Monthly-average maps & graphs of NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis and other data The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis project provides estimates of many atmospheric variables for the entire globe, going back to 1948. These estimates are based primarily upon running a numerical weather model backwards in time, using data from radiosondes and other sources, to fill in the spatial and temporal gaps in the observational record and provide consistent climatological data. The numerical model used for the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis was run with grid sizes of approximately 2° latitude by 2° longitude, so phenomena operating at small spatial scales may not be apparent in this dataset, but other data sources with slightly finer spatial resolutions are also available from this website. To learn more, see Kalnay et al. (1996). |
| Daily-mean maps & graphs of NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis and other data Same as above but with different options for date ranges and compositing. |
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| Date-range composite maps & graphs of NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis and other data Same as above but with different options for date ranges and compositing. |
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| Other climate data plotters and analysis products from CDC Similar to the links above but with many other data sources and visualization options. |
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| Buoys and Beaches | LaJollaSurf.org: surfing-related wave, water, and weather conditions Includes buoys with air and sea-surface temperatures (one of which is near the Coal Oil Point station), wave-forecasting models, maps, current and archived conditions, focusing on Southern California |
| Pollutant levels at Santa Barbara's beaches, weekly measurements From sbcphd.org, generally updated on Wednesdays and Fridays. |
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| Other Atmosphere & Ocean Links | Climatological maps and tables for Western US stations from dri.edu Long-range averages for many meteorological variables, displayed in maps, graphs, and tables. |
| Glossary of Meteorological Terms, from NWS An intermediate-level glossary that covers most of the terms and acronyms used in the National Weather Service forecast discussions. |
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| Meteorology education and training, from meted.ucar.edu These tutorials range from beginner-level to extremely advanced, and cover modern weather-prediction technology and many topics in atmospheric science and forecasting. |
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| Channel Islands Weather Kiosk Winds, swells, tides, radar, and other products focused on the area around the California Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. |
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| Air quality maps and info for the United States from UMBC.edu Shows maps, surface-station measurements, and satellite images, depicting current air quality across the US, along with archived air-quality reports from the recent past, and text describing the types of the air pollutants present in the maps and images, such as smoke from fires. |
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| Data Zoo, from UCSD An appropriate name for what this is. |
Land-Surface Data:
Also see the remote sensing category. (All links will open in a new window).
| Digital Elevation Models | USGS Seamless Data Distribution System High-resolution DEMs, orthoimages, land-cover data, and images from a variety of sensors, many with global coverage, are available for free download from this site. |
| Topographic Maps | USGS Topographic Maps This includes the classic 1:24,000-scale topographic maps, also known as 7.5-minute quadrangles, which are available for the entire United States. |
| Maptech: Topographic Maps by zip code, state, or place name An alternative source for USGS Topo maps, along with nautical and aeronautical charts. |
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| Soils | Natural Resources Conservation Services: soils.usda.gov This includes a large soils database by the United States Department of Agriculture. |
| SoilErosion.net This includes links to many soil erosion models, and soils data. |
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| World Soil Information from isric.org Includes international soils maps and data. |
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| Hydrology | NOAA's National Hydrological Information Center This i ncludes a large number of rain gages throughout the United States |
| NOAA's River Forecast Center for the entire United States (cnrfc.noaa.gov) Near real-time and archived data from rain and river gages are available from this site, which can be very useful in forecasting floods, and fun to watch during storms. |
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| Flood Control and Water Conservation from countyofsb.org Includes daily rainfall and reservoir information for Santa Barbara County. |
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| Vegetation | USDA Plant Guide A huge, well-organized database including photos and other information about the flora of the United States. |
| Botanical Society of America's Online Image Collection A searchable database similar to the link above. |
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| CalFlora.org searchable database of California plants Like the links above, but specific to California. |
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| California Plants from CalPhotos.berkeley.edu Another good source for photos of California's flora. |
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| Fires | National Fire News from nifc.gov Includes updated estimates of burned areas, containment, and causes of currently burning fires across the United States, along with fire statistics by state, and comparisons to previous fire seasons. |
| InciWeb.org (Incident Information System) Most large fires in the United States get a page on InciWeb within a few days of when they start, which is then updated frequently with maps, photos, measures of burned areas, and estimated containment dates. |
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| NIFC.gov Current Status of Fire Crews This is another useful source for monitoring currently burning fires and planned strategies for containment and suppression. |
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| Current and archived fire detection maps from MODIS MODIS overpasses happen at approximately 10:30am, 1:30pm, 10:30pm, and 1:30am local time, every day, but these can be off by more than an hour due to daylight savings and the arbitrary shapes of time zones. MODIS can't detect fires under clouds, and even in clear air, MODIS fire detections aren't perfect, because MODIS can't detect very small fires, and may produce occasional false alarms, but that's quite rare. See Giglio et al. (2003) to learn more. |
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| KML map of recent MODIS fire detections for Google Earth, from FIRMS Each fire icon that appears in Google Earth represents the center of a MODIS pixel that was determined to contain fire by an automated algorithm (see above). Those pixels have nominal ground areas of around 2km in the across-track direction (roughly east-west), and around 1km in the along-track direction (roughly north-south), but that doesn't tell you how big the fire was within that area. The geolocation error for those fire icons is around 73 meters at 1 standard deviation, but the imagery in Google Earth may also have small geolocation errors as well. Clicking on each fire icon in Google Earth will show the time at which that detection was made, in UTC, and a confidence rating (higher numbers indicating greater confidence that the fire icon represents a real fire). |
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| Other Land-Surface Links | Ted's plate-tectonics-related links (earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.) This includes info on warning systems that can send text messages to your cell phone automatically before tsunamis arrive in certain areas. |
| National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) This place is located in Santa Barbara, and a few graduates from the UCSB Geography Department work there. |
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| Ecological Data for the James Reserve in the San Jacinto Mountains, CA This includes real-time and archived data from micrometeorological towers and webcams, along with KML files that allow you to view their data in Google Earth. |
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| National Ecological Observatory Network This includes information on observing stations like those at the link above, throughout North America. |
Tools:
(All links will open in a new window).
| Research Tools | scholar.google.com This is a good starting point: a search engine that looks specifically at scholarly journals, many of which can be viewed for free by computers on the UCSB campus and other college campuses (the journals are set to allow free access from computers with IP addresses identifying them as being located at universities that have purchased subscriptions to those journals). Some of these articles are quite advanced and technical, but they also tend to be very accurate sources of information. If you're off-campus, you may be able to access them through UCSB's proxy server. |
| ScienceDirect.com, IngentaConnect.com, JSTOR.org These are also search engines that look specifically at scholarly journals. |
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| Remote Sensing of Environment, IJRS, ISPRS, PE&RS Four well-respected journals on cutting-edge remote sensing research. |
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| ams.allenpress.com (weather, climate, oceans, and remote sensing thereof) This searches only journals by the American Meteorological Society, which tend to be very good. |
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| HowStuffWorks.com The name says it all; this is a mostly-accurate source of easy-to-understand material, but it's nowhere near as authoritative (or technical) as scholarly journals tend to be. |
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| Virtual Globes | Google Earth (free software) One of the most important geographical tools ever developed, when used properly. |
| NASA's WorldWind (free software) This has many features and datasets that Google Earth doesn't have; they both have different strengths and weaknesses. |
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| Microsoft's Virtual Earth (free software) Similar to Google Maps and Google Earth, but with some different imagery and different features. |
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| ArcGIS Explorer ESRI calls this "GIS for everyone." |
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| Encarta's Interactive World Atlas, by MSN This is useful for generating quick maps at multiple scales with a variety of basic user-selectable content |
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| Starry Night Planetarium Software (free limited demo version) This program accurately renders the configurations of stars, planets, the sun, moon, and orbiting satellites, at just about any time: past, present, or future. You can set your viewpoint anywhere on Earth, around the solar system, or from the perspective of a nearby star. It's useful for visualizing Earth-sun orbital relationships, and sunrise, sunset, day length, solar zenith and azimuth angles, from any latitude-longitude, at any time. You'll enjoy this more with a fast computer. |
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| GIS & Remote Sensing Tools | US Geospatial One-Stop at geodata.gov This is a search engine for a great variety of GIS data. |
| GIS Data for Santa Barbara County, CA, from countyofsb.org Local data such as roads and zoning are available here. |
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| ENVI (advanced remote-sensing analysis program by RSI/ITT) This is an immensely useful program for handling remotely sensed imagery, ranging from aerial photos to satellite images, passive and active systems, in the optical and microwave portions of the spectrum. It's particularly useful for spectral analysis, and this site includes extensive documentation for using ENVI. |
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| ESRI's GIS Support Center (ESRI is the company that makes ArcGIS) ArcGIS is a widely-used GIS suite, and this site can be useful for helping you to get the most out of ArcGIS, even for advanced users. |
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| Statistics | Excel Help from Microsoft.com When used to its full potential, Excel can be surprisingly powerful. |
| The R Project for Statistical Computing Free, advanced statistical software with functionality similar to S-Plus. |
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| Presentations | Free PowerPoint Player This allows you to view PowerPoint files on your computer without needing to buy the full version of PowerPoint. It doesn't allow you to edit or create PowerPoint files, however, and it can't display some elements of PowerPoint files, such as embedded Flash animations. |
| Tutorial about using PowerPoint from fgcu.edu PowerPoint is easy to use, but you may find the tips and tricks described on this site to be helpful even if you already have some experience with PowerPoint. |
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| Time, Date, Great Circles | TimeAndDate.com Converts to/from any time zone, including UTC, and describes daylight savings rules for many areas worldwide. |
| Julian Date Conversion Table Use this to convert to/from Julian Dates. |
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| Exact dates and times of solstices and equinoxes The June solstice doesn't always happen on June 21 (and time zones matter too); this shows the dates and times of solstices, equinoxes, perihelion, and aphelion, for the next few years, and for the last few years. |
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| Great Circle Route Plotter This draws a great circle route between any two points on Earth and calculates the exact distance along that route (in other words, the shortest distance between any two points on Earth). |
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| Other Tools | Orbitron - Satellite Tracking System One of several programs that can generate maps of real-time and predicted ground tracks for many satellites. |
| Ecoinformatics.org This includes lots of resources for managing ecological data. |
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| Realtime Environment for Analytical Processing (REAP) A good source of tools for analyzing environmental data, especially from field-deployed sensor networks. |
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| UCSB's Alexandria Digital Library, Search Engine A small collection of scanned historical and recent aerial photos, USGS topographic maps, and other geospatial data, with a search engine that allows queries by geographic area, date ranges, data types, and keywords. |
DISCLAIMER: We make no warranties of any kind regarding the accuracy of information at the websites linked from this page, and take no responsibility for anything bad that happens due to their use. You should only use these for decision-making purposes if you know what you're doing and understand the sources of potential error and uncertainty in these data sources.
This collection of links and descriptions was created and is maintained by Ted Eckmann; please e-mail ted@geog.ucsb.edu if anything needs to be updated, or if you'd like to use portions of this collection elsewhere.
