See What's Brewing in 'Hurricane Alleys' Live Online, on iPad and iPhone via GOES Satellite

Scientists working for NASA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. have developed continually updating "movies" of satellite imagery that allows online, iPhone and iPad viewing of any cyclone's movement in the Hurricane Alleys of the Atlantic Ocean or Eastern Pacific Ocean.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-13 satellite captures visible and infrared images of the weather over the U.S. East coast. These images are overlaid on a true color background map, and fed into small and medium-sized videos of the Gulf of Mexico and the nearby Atlantic Ocean for the last 3 days. The GOES-11 satellite provides similar coverage of the U.S. west coast and Eastern Pacific.

The GOES satellites scan further into the oceans twice per hour, offering the opportunity to watch storm development in the swath called "Hurricane Alley," from Atlantic to Pacific. The bigger scans are used to make large-scale Hurricane Alley movies for the last three to five days, illustrating the life-cycle of subtropical storms, as some of them spin up to become hurricanes.

The GOES satellites also scan the entire disk of the Earth every three hours. These are used to produce "full disk movies" from the last five days of satellite imagery data from GOES-13 in the Atlantic and GOES-11 in the eastern Pacific. With just eight frames per day, time flies by quickly as weather circulates across the Western Hemisphere.