10 Years of Weather in 3 Minutes

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-12) is being taken out of service.  GOES-12, which was launched in 2001, helped form the backbone of the nation’s weather observation system, monitoring storm systems across the U.S. East Coast and parts oft he Atlantic Ocean. (As a geostationary satellite, GOES-12 stays fixed in a single point above the Earth’s surface.) And what better way to celebrate the career of weather satellite than to watch a visualization of 10 years of weather data GOES collected compressed into three minutes. Check out the video, put together by NOAA, above—you can pinpoint the moment in late August 2005 when a gigantic storm called Katrina swept up the Gulf Coast.