On Wednesday, August 12, 2015 at 8:57:36 AM UTC-7, wrote:
I want to look at the clouds from yesterday and can't really find a good source for satellite imagery.

Opendap and ADDE data servers from the academic atmospheric sciences community hold about 30 hours of GOES 1km visible satellite imagery and a lot of other met data. It's all publically available. I've been using and learning about accessing this data with the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) from Unidata (part of NCAR) Boulder, CO. It's a phenomenal program and over the last year I've learned how to make movie loops and transcode them to *.mp4 files to assist with post analysis of contest days.

http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/#home

The learning curve is rather steep, but the documentation is quite good with some screencast videos that help. I even attended a three day workshop in 2010 that "got me up to speed". Unfortunately, I didn't keep up with it and am only recently re-familiarizing myself.

Yesterday, I demoed for myself displaying HRRR high resolution model data with thermal heights (pbl height) converted to msl feet instead of meters agl. Still a lot to learn and experiment with. I think this can become a good alternative at some point for DrJacks.net and XCSkies. With the HRRR data forecasts only reach out 15hours (24hours on development versions of the HRRR).

Walt Rogers WX