1. Earth Wallpaper Images

We provide the meteorological satellite image of the globe as the near realtime image (one hour behind) in a standard wallpaper size. If you would like to display the latest image by the automatic updating of the wallpaper, the following fixed URL may be more useful. Please note that the updating frequency of the image is one hour, so don't set the frequency value to shorter than one hour.

For searching historical wallpaper images, please use the "Change Date" menu in the top page of Digital Typhoon.

An original cloud satellite image is a gray-scale image, but we made it a color image by placing the NASA Blue Marble data as the background. Please refer to Help : Color for a detailed description.

2. Typhoon Wallpaper Images

1. Wallpaper images for past typhoons are also available. First visit the top page and search for the typhoon sequence by date, name, and location. Then you can view the typhoon sequence and proceed to "Single Image View." Then you can see the link to the wallpaper image of the respective date.
2. Images made in a suitable size for wallpaper may be found in the following pages.
   1. Wallpaper Collection - The list of wallpaper-sized images picked up from Typhoon News Weblog, and they can be used as the landscape of typhoons from space.
3. The following typhoons illustrate especially magnificient and beautiful spiral cloud patterns among ones after 1995, in which period satellite images are available on this site.
   1. Typhoon 199609 (HERB) :: Typhoon 199624 (DALE) :: Typhoon 199713 (WINNIE) :: Typhoon 199724 (JOAN) :: Typhoon 199725 (KEITH) :: Typhoon 199810 (ZEB) :: Typhoon 200122 (PODUL) :: Typhoon 200321 (LUPIT) :: Typhoon 200406 (DIANMU) :: Typhoon 200416 (CHABA) :: Typhoon 200514 (NABI)
   2. Cyclone ZOE (Southern Hemisphere)

• Typhoon image galleries on other sites

3. Latest Meteorological Satellite Images

We also provide the "latest" meteorological satellite images with fixed URLs for the convenience of automatic updates, although some of the images may not be suitable sizes as wallpaper images.

In the following we summarize some notices for viewing these images.

• The color of images are not the true color of the earth in the same sense as the coloring of maps. This is a difference from the Earth Wallpaper images, whose color is almost the true color of the earth. For example, the difference of color can be compared on 8192x8192 images of a visible image and a Blue Marble image. Please refer to Help : Color for a detailed description.
• The "latest" image may not be the "newest" image mainly because visible images are generated only between 09:00 JST (00:00 UTC) and 15:00 JST (06:00 UTC). Please check the observation time at the upper left corner of the image. Moreover, the update of visible imagery has been stopped at this moment. The update of visible imagery has started again.
• If the image is not dislayed in full scale, please check off something like "Scale the image size automatically."
• It is *not* recommended to display huge images such as the size of 4096x4096 or 8192x8192, when your computer is equipped with less than 512 MBytes main memory. Otherwise, the viewing of images may lead to heavy load, the crashing of the browser, or the reboot of the computer in the worst case.

4. Other Wallpaper Images

Solar Eclipse (Animation)

When you observe the solar eclipse from the earth, it looks like a big black shade that covers the sun, but when you change the viewpoint to a satellite and observe the solar eclipse, it looks like a big black shadow casted on the earth. This is because the place that the solar eclipse can be observed looks darker than the surrounding area because of the decrease of the amount of light from the sun.

In the example of August 22, 1998, the big black shadow moves from the top-left to bottom-right of the image and you can observe the eclipse from the dark part on the earth. Let's enjoy an astronomic scale phenomenon of the big black shadow of the moon moving through the day-night transition of the earth by the sun.

More information can be found in Solar Eclipse.

• Solar Eclipse on Auguest 22, 1998 (GIF Animation 5,225 KBytes)
• Help on GIF Animation
• NASA - Solar Eclipse Page