George W. Mindling, a Weather Bureau official in Atlanta,
Georgia, wrote prophetic lines as part of
a group of "Weatherman Poems" in 1939.
Twenty-one years
later, George Mindling's prophetic poem ceased to be prophesy and
became fact with the launching of TIROS I on April 1, 1960.
TIROS is
an acronym for Television and Infra-Red
Observation Satellite. Data from this
first meteorological satellite was processed at the Weather Bureau's
Meteorological Satellite Laboratory. This laboratory ultimately evolved
into the satellite operations of NOAA's National Environmental Satellite,
Data, and Information Service (NESDIS).
Since those first
exciting days, satellite systems have become an intrinsic part of
weather forecasting, oceanography, terrestrial mapping, and hazard
detection. NESDIS and its ancestor organizations have processed, interpreted,
and archived millions of satellite images that were acquired by those
early systems and the thirty or so NOAA owned and operated satellites
that have done so much to protect and warn the citizens of the United
States. This album of images is a pictorial history of only a small
part of those accomplishments.
