These pages contain a range of up-to-date images selected from the many sources on the Internet. The selection of the images reflect the interests of the various research groups in the department. All of the images are automatically copied from other sites, since we currently do not produce any images from our own sources. However, we convert all of the images into a standard format and we generally hold an archive of 10 days or more. Images are updated regularly. We also convert many of the images into animations. These animations are normally updated once a day, with the exception of some of the Meteosat images which are updated hourly.
All latest still images are in gif and jpg format and are always called latest.gif and latest.jpg, respectively. The latter images are generally smaller files but are also lower quality. All archive still images are held in gif format only, and have the name yymmddhh.gif (where yy is year number, mm is month number, dd is day number and hh is hour number, and thus an image created at 15.00 on 13 July 1995 is called 95071315.gif). The times sometimes correspond to the time of the image, and sometimes to the time that the file was created at Reading. All animations are in the form of fli format, the only mpeg images are for the UK and European IR images from Meteosat. Click here for information on how to display fli files on offsite computers. The animation files are typically large (10Mb) and so may take considerable time to download on slow lines.
European Weather Images
These pages contain images and animations related to European weather. These include the latest images from Meteosat and polar orbiting satellites, as well as temperatures and precipitation charts.
American Weather Images
These pages contain images and animations related to American weather. These include the latest images from the GOES satellite, as well as surface and forecast charts for the US.
Asian, Australian, and Antarctic Weather Images
These pages contain images and animations related to Asian, Australian, Antarctic satellite images and other images.
Ozone Images
These pages contain images and animations related to the latest ozone observations over Northern and Southern hemispheres, and radiosonde obervations over Antarctica.
Forecast Images
These pages contain images and animations related to European weather forecasts. Unfortunately, due to the lack of a freedom of information act in Europe, this page is the smallest of all.
Climate and Other Global Images
These pages contain images and animations related to climate statistics for the Northern hemisphere and globe, including SST, OLR, and global maps of PV.
Special Images
These pages contain images and animations of interesting past weather events and other weather data.