Weather Satellite Tracker — NOAA, JPSS, and MetOp Polar Orbiters

Weather satellites are essential for daily forecasts, severe storm tracking, and climate monitoring. They work from two very different vantage points: polar orbiters circle roughly 800 km up and sweep the whole planet twice a day, while geostationary imagers hold station 35,786 km above the equator and watch one hemisphere continuously.

This page shows the polar-orbiting fleet CelesTrak publishes in its weather group — NOAA's operational satellites and the JPSS series now flying alongside them, Europe's MetOp spacecraft, and their Russian and Chinese counterparts. Their temperature and humidity soundings feed the numerical weather prediction models behind every national forecast.

Flying low and fast also makes these the weather satellites you can actually watch: a polar orbiter crosses the sky in a few minutes, and the brighter ones are visible to the naked eye around dusk and dawn. The geostationary imagers — GOES over the Americas, Meteosat over Europe and Africa, Himawari over the Pacific — barely move against the stars instead; switch on the Geostationary category in the tracker to see that belt.