Following the launch of Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, both the Soviets and the United States went into a flurry of satellite building.  As part of that race to space, on April 1, 1960, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched the Television Infra-Red Observation Satellite (TIROS-1), the world’s first successful weather satellite.  It gave grainy black and white images of the weather patterns across the earth, but opened our eyes to new possibilities for weather observation from above.

Now, the majority of weather data that is used to feed forecast models comes not from radiosondes or ground observations but from satellite observations of the surface and atmosphere. Satellites also tell us about vegetation health, gravitational variations, and many other variables.  You can read more about it at NOAA at https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/content/celebrating-world%E2%80%99s-first-meteorological-satellite-tiros-1.